21st Century C: C Tips from the New School, Edition 2

Ben Klemens

Sep 2014 · "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

About this ebook

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.

Ratings and reviews

Nice set of usefull info and practice tips. Having a several years gap in C development I found the book to be good to update skills.

Great book. One of the best in all I read Nice tips to code in a modern way. Learned a lots.

Great book. I learned a lot of new things.

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.