21st Century C, 2nd Edition

Part I. The Environment

In the wilds outside the scripting languages’ walled gardens, there is an abundance of tools that solve the big annoyances about C, but you have to hunt for them. And I mean have to: many of these tools are absolutely necessary to write without pain. If you aren’t using a debugger (standalone or within an IDE), then you’re imposing arbitrary hardship on yourself.

There is also an abundance of existing libraries waiting to be used in your code, so you can work on the problem at hand instead of wasting time reimplementing linked lists, parsers, or other basics. It needs to be as easy as possible to compile your program using external libraries.

The following is an overview of Part I:

Chapter 1 covers setting up the basic environment, including getting a package manager and getting it to install all the requisite tools. This is all background for the interesting part, where we compile programs using libraries from elsewhere. The process is pretty standardized, involving a small set of environment variables and recipes.

Chapter 2 introduces tools for debugging, documenting, and testing, because what good is code until it’s debugged, documented, and tested?

Chapter 3 addresses Autotools, a system for packaging your code for distribution. But the chapter takes the long way, and so also covers more about writing shell scripts and makefiles.

Nothing complicates life like other people. Therefore, Chapter 4 covers Git, a system for keeping track of the slightly different ...