#120 Century C

Notes on the book 21st Century C, 2nd Edition by Ben Klemens, pubished by O’Reilly

Notes

See:

Highlights from the Table of Contents

Preface
C Is Punk Rock
Q & A (Or, the Parameters of the Book)
Standards: So Many to Choose From

I. The Environment

1. Set Yourself Up for Easy Compilation

Use a Package Manager
Compiling C with Windows
Runtime Linking
Using Makefiles
Using Libraries from Source

Good practical introduction to setting up a working environment:

compiler: gcc / clang
debugger: gdb
profiler: gprof
make
Valgrind, to test for C memory usage errors
pkg-config, for finding libraries.
Doxygen, for documentation generation
A text editor

Later chapters cover: Autotools: Autoconf, Automake, libtool

2. Debug, Test, Document

Using a Debugger
Using Valgrind to Check for Errors
Unit Testing
Error Checking
Interweaving Documentation

3. Packaging Your Project

Makefiles vs. Shell Scripts Packaging Your Code with Autotools

4. Version Control

Covers basics of git.

5. Playing Nice with Others

Dynamic Loading
Python Host

II. The Language

6. Your Pal the Pointer

Automatic, Static, and Manual Memory
Persistent State Variables
Pointers Without malloc

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

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
Deprecate Float
Comparing Unsigned Integers
Safely Parse Strings to Numbers

8. Important C Syntax that Textbooks Often Do Not Cover

Cultivate Robust and Flourishing Macros
Linkage with static and extern
The const Keyword

9. Easier Text Handling

Making String Handling Less Painful with asprintf
A Pæan to strtok
Unicode

10. Better Structures

Compound Literals
Variadic Macros
Safely Terminated Lists
Multiple Lists
Foreach
Vectorize a Function
Designated Initializers
Initialize Arrays and Structs with Zeros
Typedefs Save the Day
Return Multiple Items from a Function
Flexible Function Inputs
The Void Pointer and the Structures It Points To

11. Object-Oriented Programming in C

Shows how to use OOP concenpts in C with a couple of full examples.

12. Parallel Threads

OpenMP
Thread Local
Shared Resources
Pthreads
C atoms

13. Libraries

GLib - libGlib
POSIX
The GNU Scientific Library - libGSL
SQLite - libSQLite3
libxml and cURL (libXML2, libcURL)

Epilogue

Provides a very good “C 101”

Getting the Example Source

The git repo actually contains a ziped archive of the sources. I’ve extracted locally to a folder called example_source as follows:

$ git clone https://resources.oreilly.com/examples/0636920025108.git
$ tar zxvf 0636920025108/21st_century_examples.tgz
$ mv 21st_century_examples example_source
$ rm -fR 0636920025108

Credits and References

21st Century C - O’Reilly listing

Project Notes