Practical Programming Methodology

What you'll learn

• Explain why C remains central to systems software, how it differs from Python, and work in the Unix environment with gcc, warnings and the sanitizers from the first program.
• Describe the preprocessing, compiling, assembling and linking stages, organize programs into headers and separately compiled source files, link libraries, and tell compiler errors from linker errors.
• Use C's integer, floating-point, fixed-width and Boolean types correctly, predict integer division, conversions and overflow, apply bitwise operators, and write if, switch and loop statements.
• Define and declare functions, explain pass-by-value, scope, linkage and storage duration, trace the call stack through recursive calls, and design module interfaces in header files.
• Use pointers, the & and * operators, NULL, pointer arithmetic, pointers to pointers, const and void * correctly, and recognize null, uninitialized and dangling pointers.
• Work with arrays and C strings, explain array-to-pointer decay and the null terminator, use string.h and snprintf safely, process command-line arguments, and prevent buffer overflows.
• Allocate, resize and free heap memory with malloc, calloc, realloc and free, assign clear ownership to every block, and find leaks, use after free and double free with AddressSanitizer and Valgrind.
• Define structs, enums, unions and tagged unions, pass structs by pointer, and explain alignment, padding, offsetof and why raw struct layouts are not portable.
• Implement linked lists, stacks, dynamic arrays and chained hash tables with complete cleanup, use function pointers with qsort, and hide implementations behind opaque types.
• Read and write text and binary files through streams, check every library return value, report errors with errno and strerror, convert text to numbers with strtol, and release resources on every path.
• Build projects with make, debug with gdb using breakpoints and backtraces, write unit tests with assertions and test macros, and use static analysis and coverage to find untested and faulty code.
• Design, implement and test a Unix command-line tool that works in pipelines, manage it with Git and code review, choose and respect software licenses, and apply the ACM and IEEE Computer Society codes of ethics.