Modern C

Summary

Modern C focuses on the new and unique features of modern C programming. The book is based on the latest C standards and offers an up-to-date perspective on this tried-and-true language.

Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications.

About the Technology

C is extraordinarily modern for a 50-year-old programming language. Whether you're writing embedded code, low-level system routines, or high-performance applications, C is up to the challenge. This unique book, based on the latest C standards, exposes a modern perspective of this tried-and-true language.

About the Book

Modern C introduces you to modern day C programming, emphasizing the unique and new features of this powerful language. For new C coders, it starts with fundamentals like structure, grammar, compilation, and execution. From there, you'll advance to control structures, data types, operators, and functions, as you gain a deeper understanding of what's happening under the hood. In the final chapters, you'll explore performance considerations, reentrancy, atomicity, threads, and type-generic programming. You'll code as you go with concept-reinforcing exercises and skill-honing challenges along the way.

What's inside

• Operators and functions
• Pointers, threading, and atomicity
• C's memory model
• Hands-on exercises

About the Reader

For programmers comfortable writing simple programs in a language like Java, Python, Ruby, C#, C++, or C.

About the Author

Jens Gustedt is a senior scientist at the French National Institute for Computer Science and Control (INRIA) and co-editor of the ISO C standard.

Table of Contents

LEVEL 0 - Encounter

LEVEL 1 - Acquaintance

LEVEL 2 - Cognition

LEVEL 3 - Experience

1. Getting started
2. The principal structure of a program
3. Everything is about control
4. Expressing computations
5. Basic values and data
6. Derived data types
7. Functions
8. C library functions
9. Style
10. Organization and documentation
11. Pointers
12. The C memory model
13. Storage
14. More involved processing and IO
15. Performance
16. Function-like macros
17. Variations in control flow
18. Threads 325
19. Atomic access and memory consistency

Jens Gustedt has been a senior scientist at the French National Institute for Computer Science and Control (INRIA) since 1998, working in areas including algorithms, scientific experimentation, models for coarse-grained parallelism, and distributed locking. Currently, he's conducting the Modular C project, which has given rise to libraries such as arbogast and EiLck.