TCL

Advanced C Programming

Duration: 5 days

This course is designed for programmers who need to start writing professional code in C. It is useful to those who have some experience of programming in C already, as well as a conversion course for developers who have considerable experience in programming in other high-level languages.

ANSI Standard C is a general-purpose programming language that is widely used in areas as diverse as operating systems and games. This course will teach you how to write professional ANSI Standard C code, and how to use the functionality provided by the ANSI Standard C library. The course explores concepts and syntax through lectures, discussion and hands-on lab exercises.

Note that the course covers ANSI Standard C and the C Standard Library. It does not cover platform specific topics, and in particular, does not cover the Unix libraries.

The class involves a lot of practical work, so delegates should come along prepared to get coding. The course can be run using either GCC on Linux (or OS X), or Microsoft Visual Studio on Windows.

Course Content

Language Overview

Data types, variables and operators
Control flow
Functions
Arrays
Pointers
Strings
User-defined types
I/O
The preprocessor

Pointers and Arrays

Pointer arithmetic
Void pointers
Idiomatic use of pointers
Pointers-to-pointers
Arrays and pointers
Strings and pointers
Passing arrays to functions
Dynamic memory allocation
Using malloc and free
Command line arguments

Custom Types

Using typedef with structs
Pointers and structs
Self-referential structs
Bitfields
Unions

I/O

Opening files
Reading and writing files
Binary and text files
Random access I/O
Directory operations

The Standard Library

What is in the library?
String manipulation
Math functions
Date and time functions
Other Standard C functions
Writing variadic functions
setjmp/longjmp

Program Organization

Program layout
The preprocessor
Storage classes
Linkage
Qualifiers
Atomic operations
Alignment
Sequence points

Error Handling and Status Reporting

Using assert()
errno
perror()
Returning values from programs

Function Pointers

Declaring function pointers
Using function pointers
Implementing lookup tables

Implementing Data Structures

Linked lists
Queues
Stacks
Hashing
Recursive functions
Binary trees
Sorting