Practical C Programming, Third Edition

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.
• Put parentheses around everything else.

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.

This practical C tutorial has been updated and revised, and still focuses on the practical issues of clear and non-obfuscated code. It introduces and incorporates Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) for UNIX and Windows platforms, and leads you through the nuts & bolts of C and practical program writing concepts. The book examines declarations, expressions, arrays, decision and control statements, and guides you through the programming process, from setup and specification through coding, testing, debugging, revision and maintenance. You will also learn about functions and bit operations, types, pointers, file I/O and floating point operations. Additional coverage includes preprocessor directives, modular programming concepts, portability issues, and even recently implemented compiler changes in the areas of functions and libraries. The book really digs into C`s "dustier corners", primarily problems and solutions for do/while, goto, other operators and qualifiers. It relates your program to software engineering concepts, showing how to put it all together, from requirements and specification, to a functional description, expandability, final test and revision.

This new edition of "Practical C Programming" teaches users not only the mechanics or programming, but also how to create programs that are easy to read, maintain, and debug. It features more extensive examples and an introduction to graphical development environments. Programs conform to ANSI C.

Steve Oualline lives in Southern California, where he works as a software engineer for a major phone company. In his free time he is a real engineer on the Poway Midland Railroad. Steve has written almost a dozen books on programming and Linux software. His web site is http://www.oualline.com .