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C-Tools First Lecture: 29th May 2014

d.white@imperial.ac.uk

I have just given the first lecture of my 3 first year lectures 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 first lecture covers the following topics: Programmer's Editors: Use a single editor well. Automating Compilation: Use make. Automating Testing: Test often, test ruthlessly. Debugging: Use a debugger and know it well. Building shortlived tools on the fly. In the lecture, I strongly recommend The Pragmatic Programmer by Hunt & Thomas. The woodworking metaphor and many inspirational tips come from there. A few years ago, I wrote a review of this book in my Professional Software Development webpages, please find it here.

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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-lecture1.tgz
  • This creates a directory called c-tools-lecture1
  • Don't forget to delete the tarfile later to save space!
  • Explore the c-tools-lecture1 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.

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d.white@imperial.ac.uk Updated: May 2014

Back to my C Tools Lectures Pages.

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