Ask HN: An Advanced C Tutorial

I know few things such as structs etc. and how you can derive a class from a struct and stuff. but i have never used calloc or malloc (shudder!) and have only relied on new/delete [] for all memory management.

Thus its hard for me to understand what constitutes as C and what dosen't. I mean i dont know if C supports typedef's

another book online link http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/General/c_book/c_book/index.htm...

Advanced C, C Traps and Pitfalls, and The Standard C Library.

Those are the classics.

C Interfaces and Implementations is over-recommended by people who haven't read it. It's a literate book that consists of heavily commented code. The comments distract from the prose and you're better off getting the library sources and jumping through it with ctags.

They faithfully address all of C's quirks. It's such a little language that most quirks lurk in the syntax and machine-specific parts, like storage classes, pointers, and its crappy little type system. But to master C fully you will need to learn some assembly and play with systems software. Try to replace libc with your own standard library and see how far you go.

Write something you care about in C. Small binary analysis utilities are a fun way; write an ELF parser or something. It excels in bit-manipulation. However, doing GUIs in C or processing strings would be an exercise in boredom.

One interesting usage of sizeof() is to calculate the dimension of an array at compile time:

  #define dim(x)   (sizeof(x) / sizeof(x[0]))	

and this is handy for static arrays with dimension defined by its data, likes:

  static const struct {
    someEnum_t enCommand;
    void       (*Fxn)(stCommands_t *a_psCommand);
  } m_stCmdMap[] = {
    {CMD_SD_FREESPACE,         _sdFreeSpace},
    {CMD_SD_DISK_INFO,         _sdDiskInfo},
    {CMD_SD_FORMAT,            _sdFormat},
  }

When you add a new array elements, it just keep the stuffs going calculating it at any recompilation:

  for (i=0; i

Another useful macro to work with structs is offsetof(), its incredibly usefull when you have to port some code to different compilers/target with different alignments and paddings.