Duncan White's C-Tools 2012 Lecture Materials

C-Tools Lecture: May 2012

d.white@imperial.ac.uk
I've just given the second version of my first year lecture on C Tools, building a toolbox of useful tools, and the craft skills to use them effectively, in order to make C programming easier.

The lecture covers the following topics:

Basic Tools:

Programmer's Editors: Use a single editor well.

Automating Compilation: Use Make.

Automating Testing: ruthless testing.

Debugging: Use a debugger and know it well.

Advanced Tools:

Generating prototypes automatically.

Fixing memory leaks.

Optimization and Profiling.

Generating ADT modules automatically.

Reusable ADT modules: hashes, sets, lists, trees etc.

In the lecture, I strongly recommend The Pragmatic Programmer by Hunt & Thomas. The woodworking metaphor and many inspirational tips comes from there. A few years ago, I wrote a review of this book in my Professional Software Development webpages, please find it here.

Here are the lecture materials, covering the lecture and associated examples (of which there are many):

Here are the full size lecture notes (PDF), ie. with one slide per page. Also available in Postscript for more efficient printing.

Here are the 4-up lecture notes (PDF), ie. with 4 slides per page. Also available in Postscript for more efficient printing.

And here's the C Tools tarball, as a gzipped tar file:

Download this into your home directory,
Then extract the contents via: tar xzf c-tools.tgz
This creates a directory called c-tools
Don't forget to delete the tarfile later to save space!
Explore the c-tools directory, I suggest you start with the top level README and Makefile.

The slides are done with LaTeX's Beamer presentation class with Ann Arbor themed decorations. LaTeX still rocks! See lecture/Makefile in the tarball for details.

d.white@imperial.ac.uk
Updated: May 2012