Hacking: The Art of Exploitation, 2nd Edition

Back to Basics

Now that the idea of programming is less abstract, there are a few other important concepts to know about C. Assembly language and computer processors existed before higher-level programming languages, and many modern programming concepts have evolved through time. In the same way that knowing a little about Latin can greatly improve one's understanding of the English language, knowledge of low-level programming concepts can assist the comprehension of higher-level ones. When continuing to the next section, remember that C code must be compiled into machine instructions before it can do anything.

Strings

The value "Hello, world!\n" passed to the printf() function in the previous program is a string—technically, a character array. ...