21st Century C: C Tips from the New School

Throw out your old ideas of C, and relearn a programming language that’s substantially outgrown its origins. With 21st Century C, you’ll discover up-to-date techniques that are absent from every other C text available. C isn’t just the foundation of modern programming languages, it is a modern language, ideal for writing efficient, state-of-the-art applications. Learn to dump old habits that made sense on mainframes, and pick up the tools you need to use this evolved and aggressively simple language. No matter what programming language you currently champion, you’ll agree that C rocks.

• Set up a C programming environment with shell facilities, makefiles, text editors, debuggers, and memory checkers
• Use Autotools, C’s de facto cross-platform package manager
• Learn which older C concepts should be downplayed or deprecated
• Explore problematic C concepts that are too useful to throw out
• Solve C’s string-building problems with C-standard and POSIX-standard functions
• Use modern syntactic features for functions that take structured inputs
• Build high-level object-based libraries and programs
• Apply existing C libraries for doing advanced math, talking to Internet servers, and running databases

Ben Klemens has been doing statistical analysis and computationally-intensive modeling of populations ever since getting his PhD 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.