Advanced C Programming Course

This course is about programming in C. It's not a beginner's course. It's intended for anyone who already knows the basics of C programming and wants to know more. The course is not organized as a tutorial. It goes point by point through the language and describes the internal operations. You'll be shown things about C that you didn't know and from time to time a landmine will be pointed out to you. The course begins by taking a close look at some of the fundamental concepts of C, how the translators work and that thing about sequence points that confuses so many people. Did you know there are many different types of integers and floating point numbers in C? I'll show you all the ones that are always included with every C compiler and show you how you can find some integers of your own. You can combine the fundamental data types into larger, aggregate data types in three different ways. Characters are simply integers in C and you can represent them in lots of ways and if certain characters are not available on your computer but are required for you to be able to write C programs, you can represent those in other ways. You almost can't write a C program without doing some memory allocation. But you have to pay attention. A memory leak is only one of the possible problems. The order of execution of a statement in your program is important and C provides a number of ways to control it. This is something that is often argued about and how you do it determines your programming style. The concept of a pre-processor was introduced with C. Many experiments have been made with it over the years. The original C++ compiler ran as a C pre-processor. There is a standard pre-processor now and it's usually built into modern compilers. Pointers are fundamental to the operation of C. You must be careful with pointer arithmetic and declaring things like a pointer to a pointer to an Array of integer pointers can be tricky. C has lots of operations and the operators have residual values and there are a couple of tricks in using those residual values. Location of a variable depends on two things; the scope in which it is declared and the alignment required for its data type. Once you get these two things straight, it's obvious where everything is. This section is more than just a list of key words. It's a description of what they do and some things that are, shall we say, not quite intuitive. There are a couple of gotchas in here. This chapter is organized by the names of the header files. It describes the functions available to all C programs and the macro definitions that are in the headers. All the IO is in the library, not in the language itself. That's the course in a nutshell. The course will be useful for those who have recently begun programming in C. I promise you'll learn something new. If you're an old hand at C, you'll be reminded of something you forgot.  

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