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.
Please note: Before attending this class delegates must have a Microsoft account (signing up one is free). The instructions on how to set up a Microsoft account can be found here.
Delegates will learn how to
At the end of this course you will be able 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
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
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