21st Century C: C Tips from the New School - Softcover

Klemens, Ben

3.86

251 ratings by Goodreads

9781449327149: 21st Century C: C Tips from the New School

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1449327141 ISBN 13: 9781449327149

Publisher: O'Reilly Media, 2012

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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

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Review:

Q&A with "21st Century C" author Ben Klemens

"C has no corporation or foundation pushing it, no trademarked logos, no ad budget, and no designers on perpetual book tour. It's just a simple, fast language."

O'Reilly Media: What made you write the book?
Ben Klemens: I kept having the same conversation, with the same disconnect. I would talk about how I was having an easy time writing code in C, and the person I was talking to would tell me that doing so is impossible, because everything needs to be written from scratch and there is endless declaration and memory management cruft obscuring the real flow of the code. Finally, I got a friend to concede that maybe I wasn't hallucinating, and maybe I really was writing C code in reasonable time and with reasonable clarity, and he asked me, "OK, so can you refer me to a textbook that teaches C with a modern style?" And finally, I understood the disconnect, because I couldn't find such a text. Everything I read was at least a decade old and had a section teaching you how to re-implement linked lists yet again. The C standard was revised in 1999, allowing for a much more flowing writing style, yet these books still presented code with a halting and obtuse style.

ORM: Why is your book especially important now?
BK: I should've written it five years ago.

ORM: What is on the horizon for your readers?
BK: I have it easy here, because C is still immensely common. You can find measures that say that it is the most popular computing language, and some that rank it at maybe No. 2 or No. 3. What makes this amazing about our 40-year-old friend is that it has no corporation or foundation pushing it, no trademarked logos, no ad budget, and no designers on perpetual book tour. It's just a simple, fast language. And it's not going away very quickly. I have no idea what we'll be writing 50 years from now, but I'm pretty confident that in five or 10 years, we'll still be writing a lot of C code. Also, C is still the lingua franca of computing. So many languages have a back door that lets you write some code in C, so even people who long ago decided to avoid C eventually find themselves writing little snippets in it.

By the way, I'm obviously a satisfied user, but I come neither to praise or to bury C. The language has warts, many of which I point out in the book along the way to pointing out its better features.

ORM: What is the single most important take-away from your book?
BK: Use libraries. If you don't know how to link to a binary tree library, you are doomed to write your own binary tree implementation. I think a lot of the people who think everything in C has to be written from scratch have just never learned how to reliably link their code to the wealth of existing libraries.

ORM: Who is your intended audience?
BK: I have two.

People who only know a smattering of C, which they picked up on the street.
People who learned C from a more traditional textbook, and know that they need to update from how C was written in the 1980s. Probably included here are CS majors who were traumatized by their college C textbook and decided they hate C, that it is an unmerciful disaster, and so begins a downward spiral where they avoid writing in C, so when they do have some C-based problem it is a melancholy burden, so after getting that done they avoid writing any more C for as long as possible and thus their skills get rustier. This book can help to break the cycle.

About the Author:

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 FederalGovernment.

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