9. Topic 8 - Advanced Topics

We have now covered all of the concepts and constructs required to write C programs. We are now prepared to study advanced C programming topics such as network programming or graphical interface programming. Mastering various advanced topics is just a matter of understanding the application (not always a trivial matter) and becoming familiar with how to use some new functions.

One advanced area of C programming which is worthy of discussion in this introductory C class is multi-process or concurrent programming. Multi-process programs can be used to solve many problems. While mastering this topic only requires learning about a few new functions, and no new constructs of the language, these functions make calls (called system calls) to the operating system kernel which are very different than the functions we studied for single process programs. In this topic, we will discuss the creation of new processes, running of new programs, interprocess communication and we will introduce a mechanism called treads which is used for parallel processing within a single process. .. only:: html

Contents:

• 9.1. Multi-process Programming
  • 9.1.1. fork()
  • 9.1.2. pipe( int * )
  • 9.1.3. dup( int )
  • 9.1.4. execl( char *cmdPath, char *arg0, … )
• 9.2. Signals
• 9.3. Multi-threaded Programming
  • 9.3.1. examples
• 9.4. File Descriptor Example