21st Century C

Throw out your old ideas about C and get to know a programming language that’s substantially outgrown its origins. With this revised edition of 21st Century C, you’ll discover up-to-date techniques missing from other C tutorials, whether you’re new to the language or just getting reacquainted.

C isn’t just the foundation of modern programming languages; it is a modern language, ideal for writing efficient, state-of-the-art applications. Get past idioms that made sense on mainframes and learn the tools you need to work with this evolved and aggressively simple language. No matter what programming language you currently favor, you’ll quickly see that 21st century 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 about the problematic C concepts too useful to discard
• Solve C’s string-building problems with C-standard functions
• Use modern syntactic features for functions that take structured inputs
• Build high-level, object-based libraries and programs
• Perform advanced math, talk to internet servers, and run databases with existing C libraries

This edition also includes new material on concurrent threads, virtual tables, C99 numeric types, and other features.

Table of Contents

Part I. The Environment

Chapter 1. Set Yourself Up for Easy Compilation

Chapter 2. Debug, Test, Document

Chapter 3. Packaging Your Project

Chapter 4. Version Control

Chapter 5. Playing Nice with Others

Part II. The Language

Chapter 6. Your Pal the Pointer

Chapter 7. Inessential C Syntax that Textbooks Spend a Lot of Time Covering

Chapter 8. Important C Syntax that Textbooks Often Do Not Cover

Chapter 9. Easier Text Handling

Chapter 10. Better Structures

Chapter 11. Object-Oriented Programming in C

Chapter 12. Parallel Threads

Chapter 13. Libraries

About the Author

Ben Klemens has been doing statistical analysis and computationally-intensive modeling of populations ever since getting his PhD in Social Sciences from Caltech. He is of the opinion that writing code should be fun, and has had a grand time writing analyses and models (mostly in C) for the Brookings Institution, the World Bank, National Institute of Mental Health, et al. As a Nonresident Fellow at Brookings and with the Free Software Foundation, he has done work on ensuring that creative authors retain the right to use the software they write. He currently works for the United States FederalGovernment.