21st Century C: C Tips from the New School

Description

Throw out your old ideas of C, and relearn a programming language that’s substantially outgrown its origins. With 21st Century C, you’ll discover up-to-date techniques that are absent from every other C text available. C isn’t just the foundation of modern programming languages, it is a modern language, ideal for writing efficient, state-of-the-art applications. Learn to dump old habits that made sense on mainframes, and pick up the tools you need to use this evolved and aggressively simple language. No matter what programming language you currently champion, you’ll agree that C rocks. Set up a C programming environment with shell facilities, makefiles, text editors, debuggers, and memory checkers Use Autotools, C’s de facto cross-platform package manager Learn which older C concepts should be downplayed or deprecated Explore problematic C concepts that are too useful to throw out Solve C’s string-building problems with C-standard and POSIX-standard functions Use modern syntactic features for functions that take structured inputs Build high-level object-based libraries and programs Apply existing C libraries for doing advanced math, talking to Internet servers, and running databases Table of Contents Preface C Is Punk Rock Q & A (Or, the Parameters of the Book) Standards: So Many to Choose From The POSIX Standard Some Logistics Conventions Used in This Book Using Code Examples Safari® Books Online How to Contact Us Acknowledgments Part I. The Environment Chapter 1. Set Yourself Up for Easy Compilation Use a Package Manager Compiling C with Windows POSIX for Windows Compiling C with POSIX Compiling C Without POSIX Which Way to the Library? A Few of My Favorite Flags Paths Runtime Linking Using Makefiles Setting Variables The Rules Using Libraries from Source Using Libraries from Source (Even if Your Sysadmin Doesn’t Want You To) Compiling C Programs via Here Document Include Header Files from the Command Line The Unified Header Here Documents Compiling from stdin Chapter 2. Debug, Test, Document Using a Debugger GDB Variables Print Your Structures Using Valgrind to Check for Errors Unit Testing Using a Program as a Library Coverage Interweaving Documentation Doxygen The narrative Literate Code with CWEB Error Checking What Is the User’s Involvement in the Error? The Context in Which the User Is Working How Should the Error Indication Be Returned? Chapter 3. Packaging Your Project The Shell Replacing Shell Commands with Their Outputs Use the Shell’s for Loops to Operate on a Set of Files Test for Files fc Makefiles vs. Shell Scripts Packaging Your Code with Autotools An Autotools Demo Describing the Makefile with makefile.am Form variables Content variables Adding testing Adding makefile bits The configure Script More Bits of Shell Chapter 4. Version Control Changes via diff Git’s Objects The Stash Trees and Their Branches Merging The Rebase Remote Repositories Chapter 5. Playing Nice with Others The Process Writing to Be Read by Nonnatives The Wrapper Function Smuggling Data Structures Across the Border Linking Python Host Compiling and Linking The Conditional Subdirectory for Automake Distutils Backed with Autotools Part II. The Language Chapter 6. Your Pal the Pointer Automatic, Static, and Manual Memory Persistent State Variables Pointers Without malloc Structures Get Copied, Arrays Get Aliased malloc and Memory-Twiddling The Fault Is in Our Stars All the Pointer Arithmetic You Need to Know Typedef as a teaching tool Chapter 7. C Syntax You Can Ignore Don’t Bother Explicitly Returning from main Let Declarations Flow Set Array Size at Runtime Cast Less Enums and Strings Labels, gotos, switches, and breaks goto Considered switch Deprecate Float Chapter 8. Obstacles and Opportunity Cultivate Robust and Flourishing Macros Preprocessor Tricks Linkage with static and extern Declare Externally Linked Elements Only in Header Files The const Keyword Noun-Adjective Form Tension Depth The char const ** Issue Chapter 9. Text Making String Handling Less Painful with asprintf Security Constant Strings Extending Strings with asprintf A Pæan to strtok Unicode The Encoding for C Code Unicode Libraries The Sample Code Chapter 10. Better Structures Compound Literals Initialization via Compound Literals Variadic Macros Safely Terminated Lists Foreach Vectorize a Function Designated Initializers Initialize Arrays and Structs with Zeros Typedefs Save the Day A Style Note Return Multiple Items from a Function Reporting Errors Flexible Function Inputs Declare Your Function as printf-Style Optional and Named Arguments Polishing a Dull Function The Void Pointer and the Structures It Points To Functions with Generic Inputs Generic Structures Chapter 11. Object-Oriented Programming in C What You Don’t Get (and Why You Won’t Miss It) Scope Private struct elements Overloaded with Operator Overloading _Generic Extending Structures and Dictionaries Extending a Structure C, with fewer seams Implementing a Dictionary Base Your Code on Pointers to Objects Functions in Your Structs Count References Example: A Substring Object An Agent-Based Model of Group Formation Chapter 12. Libraries GLib POSIX Using mmap for Gigantic Data Sets Easy Threading with Pthreads The pthreads checklist Protect threaded resources with mutexes The example _Thread_local and static variables The GNU Scientific Library SQLite The Queries libxml and cURL Epilogue Glossary Bibliography Index