Intermediate C Programming

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Preface

Foreword

Imagine you run a research or development group where writing software is the means

to examine new physics or new designs. You look for students or employees who have a

technical background in that speciﬁc physics or science, yet you also look for some software

experience. You will typically ﬁnd that students will have taken a programming class or

have tinkered around with some small programs. But in general they have never written

software with any serious complexity, they have never worked in a team of people, and they

are scared to dive into an existing piece of scientiﬁc software.

Well, that is my situation. My research group studies electron ﬂow at the nanometer

scale in the very transistors that power your future computer. As a faculty member I have

found that most of today’s graduated bachelor students in engineering or physical sciences

are used to writing small programs in scripting languages and are not even familiar with

compiling, practical debugging, or good programming practices.

I believe my situation is not unique but quite common in academia and industry. How

can you bring these novices up to speed? How can you give them the day-to-day practical

insights fast, that I had to learn through years of slow cut and try experiences?

Most advanced programming books explain complex or larger programs that are correct

and beautiful. There is an analogy here between reading a well-written book and composing

a new novel yourself. Literature analysis helps the reader to appreciate the content or the

context of a novel. While many people can read a correctly formulated algorithm in C,

few people would be able to write this code even if they were given the pseudocode (the

storyline). This book provides an entry into writing your own real code in C.

I believe that this new book provides an excellent entry way into practical software

development practices that will enable my beginning and even advanced students to be

more productive in their day-to-day work, by avoiding typical mistakes and by writing

cleaner code, since they understand the underlying implications better. This book will also

facilitate the collaborations within the group through exemplary coding styles and practices.

This book explains the importance of detecting hidden problems. A common mistake

among most students is that they pay attention to only the surface: the outputs of their

programs. Their programs may have serious problems beneath the surface. If the programs

generate correct outputs in a few cases, the students believe that the programs are correct.

This is dangerous in this connected world: A small careless mistake may become a security

threat to large complex systems. Creating a secure and reliable system starts from paying

attention to details. This book certainly covers many details where careless mistakes may

cause serious problems.

I wished I had this book some 20 years ago after I had read through Kernighan and

Richie. Back then I began writing a large code basis in C after my coding experience in

FORTRAN. Passing by reference, passing by value—simple concepts, but this book plays

out these concepts in a pedagogically sound approach. I truly like the hands-on examples

that are eye opening.

I recommend this book to anyone who needs to write software beyond the tinkering level.

You will learn how to program well. You will learn how to identify and eliminate bugs. You

will learn how to write clean code, that cleans up after itself, so it can be called millions of

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times without crashing your own or someone else’s computer. You will learn how to share

code with others. All along you will begin to use standard LINUX-based tools such as ddd,

valgrind, and others.

Gerhard Klimeck

Reilly Director of the Center for Predictive Materials and Devices (c-PRIMED) and the

NCN (Network for Computational Nanotechnology)

Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue.

Fellow of the Institute of Physics (IOP), the American Physical Society, (APS) and

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Table of Contents for Intermediate C Programming

Table of Contents for
Intermediate C Programming