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C Programming Tools First Lecture: released 18th May 2021

d.white@imperial.ac.uk

I have now released the first of my 5 pre-recorded lectures on C Programming Tools, building a toolbox of useful tools, and the craft skills to use them effectively, in order to make C programming easier. This year, I've split each lecture video into several shorter, more manageable chunks, and have just uploaded them into Panopto. The first lecture covers the following topics: Introduction to the Lectures: Why build tools? Programmer's Editors: Use a single editor well. Automating Compilation: Use make or cmake. Multi-directory C projects with libraries. In the lecture, I strongly recommend The Pragmatic Programmer by Hunt & Thomas. The tool building 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 a tarball of associated examples (of which there are many):

• Here are the full size lecture notes (PDF), ie. with one slide per page.
• Here are the 4-up lecture notes (PDF), ie. with 4 slides per page.
• Here's the C Tools lecture 1 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 tarball later to save space!)
  • Explore the c-tools-lecture1 directory, I suggest you start with the top level README and Makefile.
  • It's important to do the preparation (make mkdir and .bashrc alterations) as the README tells you to do, if you forget this later stages will fail.
• For anyone using a version of Perl older than Perl 5.22, please use cb.oldperl instead of the 08.cbuild/cb (cbuild) script in the tarball, and similarly use Rules.pm.oldperl instead of the 08.cbuild/Rules.pm module. Place cb.oldperl and Rules.pm.oldperl into your 08.cbuild directory and then:

       cd 08.cbuild
       mv cb cb.newperl
       mv cb.oldperl cb
       mv Rules.pm Rules.pm.newperl
       mv Rules.pm.oldperl Rules.pm
       make install
     

• Here are the 3 videos in Panopto:
  • C Tools Lecture 1 Part 1
  • C Tools Lecture 1 Part 2
  • C Tools Lecture 1 Part 3
• 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 2021

Back to my C Tools Lectures Pages.

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