Best Books for Learning C Programming

Improve your programming through a solid understanding of C pointers and memory management. With this practical book, you’ll learn how pointers provide the mechanism to dynamically manipulate memory, enhance support for data structures, and enable access to hardware. Author Richard Reese shows you how to use pointers with arrays, strings, structures, and functions, using memory models throughout the book.

Difficult to master, pointers provide C with much flexibility and power—yet few resources are dedicated to this data type. This comprehensive book has the information you need, whether you’re a beginner or an experienced C or C++ programmer or developer.

• Get an introduction to pointers, including the declaration of different pointer types
• Learn about dynamic memory allocation, de-allocation, and alternative memory management techniques
• Use techniques for passing or returning data to and from functions
• Understand the fundamental aspects of arrays as they relate to pointers
• Explore the basics of strings and how pointers are used to support them
• Examine why pointers can be the source of security problems, such as buffer overflow
• Learn several pointer techniques, such as the use of opaque pointers, bounded pointers and, the restrict keyword

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.