- Preface
- I. The Environment
- 1. Set Yourself Up for Easy Compilation
- 2. Debug, Test, Document
- 3. Packaging Your Project
- 4. Version Control
- 5. Playing Nice with Others
- II. The Language
- 6. Your Pal the Pointer
- 7. Inessential C Syntax that Textbooks Spend a Lot of Time Covering
- 8. Important C Syntax that Textbooks Often Do Not Cover
- 9. Easier Text Handling
- 10. Better Structures
- Compound Literals
- Variadic Macros
- Safely Terminated Lists
- Multiple Lists
- Foreach
- Vectorize a Function
- Designated Initializers
- Initialize Arrays and Structs with Zeros
- Typedefs Save the Day
- Return Multiple Items from a Function
- Flexible Function Inputs
- The Void Pointer and the Structures It Points To
- 11. Object-Oriented Programming in C
- 12. Parallel Threads
- 13. Libraries
- Epilogue
- A. C 101
- The Structure
- Variable Declarations
- Expressions
- The scoping rules for C are very simple
- The main function is special
- Most of what a C program actually does is evaluate expressions
- Functions are evaluated using copies of the inputs
- Expressions are delimited by semicolons
- There are many shortcuts for incrementing or scaling a variable
- C has an expansive definition of truth
- Dividing two integers always produces an integer
- C has a trinary conditional operator
- Branching and looping expressions are not very different from any other language
- The for loop is just a compact version of the while loop
- Pointers
- You can directly request a block of memory
- Arrays are just blocks of memory; any block of memory can be used like an array
- A pointer to a scalar is really just a one-item array
- There is a special notation for elements of pointed-to structs
- Pointers let you modify function inputs
- Everything is somewhere, so everything can be pointed to
- Glossary
- References
- Index
About the Author
Ben Klemens has been doing statistical analysis and computationally intensive modeling of populations ever since getting his Ph.D. 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 Federal Government.
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