Fluent C

Preface

You picked up this book to move your programming skills one step forward. That is good, because you’ll definitely benefit from the hands-on knowledge provided in this book. If you have a lot of experience programming in C, you’ll learn the details of good design decisions and about their benefits and drawbacks. If you are fairly new to C programming, you’ll find guidance about design decisions, and you’ll see how these decisions are applied bit by bit to running code examples for building larger scale programs.

The book answers questions such as how to structure a C program, how to cope with error handling, or how to design flexible interfaces. As you learn more about C programming, questions often pop up, such as the following:

• Should I return any error information I have?

• Should I use the global variable errno to do that?

• Should I have few functions with many parameters or the other way around?

• How do I build a flexible interface?

• How can I build basic things like an iterator?

For object-oriented languages, most of these questions are answered to a great extent by the Gang of Four book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides (Prentice Hall, 1997). Design patterns provide a programmer with best practices on how objects should interact and which object owns which other kinds of objects. Also, design patterns show how such objects can be grouped together.

However, for procedural ...