Advanced C Language Programming

Revision: TE2102_20060318

Course Length:

5 Days

Course Description:

This course broadens the skills of a C language programmer by introducing sophisticated problem solving techniques including the advanced use of pointers, abstract data types, data structures, portability, and optimization techniques. Skills are reinforced by hands-on laboratory exercises.

Who Should Attend:

This course is for anybody who has been programming in C for at least six months or who is a skilled programmer and has taken a C introductory course.

Benefits of Attendance:

Upon completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Master the use of pointers in a wide variety of problems.
• Use sophisticated pointer techniques to solve problems involving advanced data structures such as lists, stacks, queues and trees.
• Choose from a wide variety of data structures to implement the most efficient solution to a problem.
• Apply the proper optimization technique to your C code.
• Apply many portability techniques to your C code.
• Use bit manipulation techniques for efficient solutions to problems.
• Write programs which emphasize modern program design techniques which emphasize code reuse.
• Write powerful C programs which make "calls" directly into the UNIX operating system through the use of system calls.
• Decrease development time in writing applications through a more thorough understanding of sophisticated concepts in C.

Prerequisites:

Students should have at least six months of C programming experience.

Course Outline:

• Chapter 1: Review Of C
  1. Fundamental data types
  2. Operators
  3. Control flow constructs - If
  4. Loops
  5. Switch
  6. Derived data types
  7. Arrays and pointers
  8. Structures
  9. Unions
  10. Bit Fields
  11. Enums
• Chapter 2: Functions
  1. Function fundamentals
  2. Function prototypes
  3. Return values
  4. Recursive functions
  5. Evaluation of function arguments
  6. Variable number of arguments
  7. Scope of variables
  8. Initialization
• Chapter 3: Bit Manipulation
  1. Defining the problem space
  2. Operators
  3. Writing bitwise functions
  4. Circular shifts
  5. Direct lookup
  6. Mapping with bits
  7. Radix sorting
• Chapter 4: Pointers
  1. Common pointer constructions
  2. Pointer arithmetic
  3. Command line arguments
  4. The environment pointer
  5. Processing arrays with pointers
  6. Simulating higher dimensional arrays
  7. Two dimensional arrays
  8. Complex declarations
  9. Pointers to functions
  10. Surrogate sorting
• Chapter 5: Designing Data Types
  1. Rationale for a new data type
  2. Creating the fraction type
  3. Implementing the fraction functions
  4. Applications with fractions
  5. Creating the set type
  6. Set representation
  7. Set function implementations
• Chapter 6: Data Structures
  1. Lists - What are they?
  2. Lists as arrays
  3. A list of linked elements
  4. The list data type
  5. List function implementation
  6. Other types of lists
  7. Ordered lists
  8. Circular lists
  9. Two way lists
  10. Networks
  11. A linked list application - hashing
  12. Stacks
  13. Queues
  14. Trees
• Chapter 7: Optimization Techniques
  1. Where to optimize
  2. Macros
  3. Initialization
  4. Modifying data structures
  5. Caching
  6. Removing invariants from loops
  7. Logical inefficiencies
  8. Odds and ends
• Chapter 8: Portability Issues
  1. Source code portability
  2. Portability with functions
  3. Arithmetic data types
  4. Bit manipulation problems
  5. Portable bit masks
  6. Pointer problems
  7. ANSI vs non-ANSI
  8. Odds and ends
• Appendix A: Software Tools
  1. Compiler options
  2. Conditional compilation
  3. Debugging with the assert macro
  4. Creating libraries
  5. A graphics example
  6. The make command
  7. The source code control system
• Appendix B: Useful Library Functions
  1. The system function
  2. Exit and atexit
  3. The signal function
  4. Strtok
  5. Memcpy and memset
  6. Qsort
  7. Bsearch
  8. Strstr
  9. String validation functions
• Appendix C: I/O File Access
  1. System calls vs library calls
  2. Opening disk files
  3. Access mode
  4. Errors in opening files
  5. I/O library calls
  6. The scanf functions
  7. Closing files
  8. Servicing errors
  9. Binary I/O