Faith Ekstrand

Unit 2: Advanced C programming

This unit expands on the material covered in Unit 1 and applies it to making bigger more complex projects. In order to do this we discuss the compiling and linking process in more depth and introduce tools and techniques that make larger software projects possible.

Schedule

Week 1

• Pointers, arrays, and the pass-by-reference model
• Best practices for organizing code
• Two types of memory: the stack and the heap
• Error handling
• Memory and resource management

Project: String Builder

Project description can be found here.

Week 2

• The basics of compilers and a bit of their history
• Linking and working with multiple files
• The C preprocessor and the include directive
• Header file best practices
• Debugging with GDB
• More about the linking process: dynamic linking
• Using external libraries
• An examples: GSL
• Makefiles

Project: Debugging

Project description can be found here.

Copyright 2007-2023 Faith and Laura Ekstrand. Licensed under the CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.
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