Organisation of the Text
This text is organised in a sequential fashion—from fundamentals to higher-level constructs and
software design issues. The core language is covered in Chapters 2-5 and 7-13. (The material
required to understand the examples in this chapter is covered in Chapters 2 and 3, and Sections
7.1, 7.2, and 8.2.)
Throughout the text, design techniques and good programming practice are emphasised to en-
courage a coding style conducive to building large-scale software systems. Good quality software not
only works correctly, but is easy to read and understand, written in a clean, consistent style, and
structured for future maintenance and extension. The basic process of program design is presented
in Chapter 6.
Chapters 14 and 15 describe more advanced use of the C language, and are arguably the most
interesting chapters of the book as they show how the individual language features combine to
permit very powerful programming techniques. Chapter 14 discusses generic programming, which
is the design of functions that can operate on a variety of different data types. Chapter 15 presents a selection of the fundamental data-structures that appear in many real programs and are both instructive and useful.
Chapter 16 provides a context for the book by describing how the ISO C language fits into
the wider world of programming. Real world programming involves a great number of extensions
beyond the standard language and C programmers must deal with other libraries, and possibly other
languages, when writing real applications. Chapter 16 gives a taste of some of the issues.
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