Advanced C

Overview

This course is designed for the practising software developer and allows delegates to gain a better understanding of the language, run-time library, and software engineering techniques available with the C language.

‘Advanced C’ increases delegate’s knowledge and understanding of the language, including the recent ISO 9899:1999 (C99) standard changes, and helps delegates to gain experience in areas of C that previous work may not have covered. Delegates will also be better equipped to write and maintain large C programs, and will also gain a better understanding of the way the language works and is implemented. 

Prerequisites

• Between three and six months of concentrated C programming experience
• Experience of structured data types
• Experience of the declaration and use of pointers
• The course will also benefit self-taught C programmers wishing to gain a formal education in the language. 

Delegates will learn how to

• Read and write complex data declarations and type definitions
• Use advanced pointer techniques to construct and work with complex data structures
• Use advanced standard library functions, including process control, searching and sorting
• Handle memory allocation
• Exploit features of C99

Course Outline

Chapter 1: C Standards

• Review of C standards
• K&R1 and STDC functions
• C99 inline functions
• Enumeration
• const, volatile, Boolean, and floating point types
• Limits

Chapter 2: The Preprocessor

• Predefined macros
• Conditional compilation
• Advanced directives (including assert)
• Trigraphs and C99 digraphs
• C99 Variadic macros

Chapter 3: Declarations

• Reading and writing declarations
• Using typedefs effectively
• Using casts

Chapter 4: Advanced Pointers

• Levels of indirection
• Void pointers
• Defining and using function pointers
• C99 restricted pointers

Chapter 5: Advanced Arrays

• Arrays and functions
• Pointers and arrays
• C99 Variable Length Arrays
• memset

Chapter 6: Arrays of Arrays

• Declarations
• Initialisation
• Arrays of arrays as function arguments

Chapter 7: Advanced Structures

• Declaring and defining structures
• C99 changes
• Bitfields
• Packing and padding
• Reading and writing structs to files

Chapter 8: Dynamic Memory Management

• Allocating arrays
• Allocating structures
• Error detection and debugging techniques
• Writing your own error detection library

Chapter 9: Standard Library – Process Control

• Running another process
• Process termination
• Exception handling (setjmp/longjmp)
• Environment variables

Chapter 10: Standard Library – Useful Functions

• Calling conventions
• Writing variadic functions
• Date and time functions
• Random numbers

Chapter 11: Sorting and Searching

• qsort
• Comparison functions
• Indirect sorting (pointers)
• bsearch

Chapter 12: Linked Lists

• Linked list principles
• Using recursive functions
• Implementing a circular list
• Implementing a self-adjusting list

Chapter 13: Binary Trees

• Binary tree principles
• Using trees for sorted data
• Insertion
• Deletion