The Environment
Chapter 1 Set Yourself Up for Easy Compilation
Use a Package Manager
Compiling C with Windows
Which Way to the Library?
Using Makefiles
Using Libraries from Source
Using Libraries from Source (Even if Your Sysadmin Doesn’t Want You To)
Compiling C Programs via Here Document
Chapter 2 Debug, Test, Document
Using a Debugger
Using Valgrind to Check for Errors
Unit Testing
Interweaving Documentation
Error Checking
Chapter 3 Packaging Your Project
The Shell
Makefiles vs. Shell Scripts
Packaging Your Code with Autotools
Chapter 4 Version Control
Changes via diff
Git’s Objects
Trees and Their Branches
Remote Repositories
Chapter 5 Playing Nice with Others
The Process
Python Host
The Language
Chapter 6 Your Pal the Pointer
Automatic, Static, and Manual Memory
Persistent State Variables
Pointers Without malloc
Chapter 7 C Syntax You Can Ignore
Don’t Bother Explicitly Returning from main
Let Declarations Flow
Cast Less
Enums and Strings
Labels, gotos, switches, and breaks
Deprecate Float
Chapter 8 Obstacles and Opportunity
Cultivate Robust and Flourishing Macros
Linkage with static and extern
The const Keyword
Chapter 9 Text
Making String Handling Less Painful with asprintf
A Pæan to strtok
Unicode
Chapter 10 Better Structures
Compound Literals
Variadic Macros
Safely Terminated Lists
Foreach
Vectorize a Function
Designated Initializers
Initialize Arrays and Structs with Zeros
Typedefs Save the Day
Return Multiple Items from a Function
Flexible Function Inputs
The Void Pointer and the Structures It Points To
Chapter 11 Object-Oriented Programming in C
What You Don’t Get (and Why You Won’t Miss It)
Extending Structures and Dictionaries
Functions in Your Structs
Count References
Chapter 12 Libraries
GLib
POSIX
The GNU Scientific Library
SQLite
libxml and cURL

Epilogue
Glossary
Bibliography
Colophon

Throw out your old ideas of C, and relearn a programming language that’s substantially outgrown its origins. With 21st Century C, you’ll discover up-to-date techniques that are absent from every other C text available. C isn’t just the foundation of modern programming languages, it is a modern language, ideal for writing efficient, state-of-the-art applications. Learn to dump old habits that made sense on mainframes, and pick up the tools you need to use this evolved and aggressively simple language. No matter what programming language you currently champion, you’ll agree that C rocks.

Set up a C programming environment with shell facilities, makefiles, text editors, debuggers, and memory checkers
Use Autotools, C’s de facto cross-platform package manager
Learn which older C concepts should be downplayed or deprecated
Explore problematic C concepts that are too useful to throw out
Solve C’s string-building problems with C-standard and POSIX-standard functions
Use modern syntactic features for functions that take structured inputs
Build high-level object-based libraries and programs
Apply existing C libraries for doing advanced math, talking to Internet servers, and running databases