Practical C Programming, 3rd Edition

11/15/2011 · No Responses

There are lots of introductory C books, but this is the first one that has the no-nonsense, practical approach that has made Nutshell Handbooks® famous.

C programming is more than just getting the syntax right. Style and debugging also play a tremendous part in creating programs that run well and are easy to maintain. This book teaches you not only the mechanics of programming, but also describes how to create programs that are easy to read, debug, and update.

Practical rules are stressed. For example, there are fifteen precedence rules in C (&& comes before || comes before ?:). The practical programmer reduces these to two:

Multiplication and division come before addition and subtraction.

Contrary to popular belief, most programmers do not spend most of their time creating code. Most of their time is spent modifying someone else’s code. This books shows you how to avoid the all-too-common obfuscated uses of C (and also to recognize these uses when you encounter them in existing programs) and thereby to leave code that the programmer responsible for maintenance does not have to struggle with. Electronic Archaeology, the art of going through someone else’s code, is described.

This third edition introduces popular Integrated Development Environments on Windows systems, as well as UNIX programming utilities, and features a large statistics-generating program to pull together the concepts and features in the language.

Table of Contents
Part I: Basics
Chapter 1. What Is C?
Chapter 2. Basics of Program Writing
Chapter 3. Style
Chapter 4. Basic Declarations and Expressions
Chapter 5. Arrays, Qualifiers, and Reading Numbers
Chapter 6. Decision and Control Statements
Chapter 7. Programming Process

Part II: Simple Programming
Chapter 8. More Control Statements
Chapter 9. Variable Scope and Functions
Chapter 10. C Preprocessor
Chapter 11. Bit Operations
Chapter 12. Advanced Types
Chapter 13. Simple Pointers
Chapter 14. File Input/Output
Chapter 15. Debugging and Optimization
Chapter 16. Floating Point

Part III: Advanced Programming Concepts
Chapter 17. Advanced Pointers
Chapter 18. Modular Programming
Chapter 19. Ancient Compilers
Chapter 20. Portability Problems
Chapter 21. C’s Dustier Corners
Chapter 22. Putting It All Together
Chapter 23. Programming Adages

Part IV: Other Language Features
Appendix A. ASCII Table
Appendix B. Ranges and Parameter Passing Conversions
Appendix C. Operator Precedence Rules
Appendix D. A Program to Compute a Sine Using a Power Series