Intermediate C Programming, 2nd Edition

Intermediate C Programming, 2nd Edition#

I’m happy to share the second edition of Intermediate C Programming, co-authored with Yung-Hsiang Lu (Purdue University) and published by Routledge / Taylor & Francis Group. This edition expands the software engineering coverage that much of my own teaching in the Software Systems Laboratory (COMP 310) draws on.

What the Book Is About#

The C programming language remains vital to modern topics such as cybersecurity, computer systems, computer engineering, and scientific computing — but most introductory courses stop well short of what it takes to write real, professional-grade C. This book is meant as the bridge: it takes students from short, correct-enough programs to code that can survive debugging, testing, collaboration, and reuse.

What’s Inside#

The book is organized into four parts, 24 chapters in total:

  • Part I — Storage: Memory and File. Program execution, stack memory, debugging techniques, pointers, multi-file programs, strings, heap memory, file I/O, and security considerations.

  • Part II — Recursion. Recursive problem solving through examples like ball selection, the Tower of Hanoi, integer partitions, binary search, and quicksort.

  • Part III — Structure. Custom data types, objects, linked lists, and binary search trees.

  • Part IV — Applications. Real-world problems: maze navigation, Sudoku solving, image processing, and Huffman compression.

New in this second edition is expanded software engineering material: version control with git and GitHub, unit testing with the Google Test framework, and threading with POSIX threads — alongside the existing use of standard Linux tools like ddd and valgrind for debugging.

Why It Matters#

Most C textbooks either stay introductory or jump straight into advanced systems topics. This book is deliberately aimed at the space in between: the practices — clean code, testing, version control, debugging discipline — that turn a student who can write a program into an engineer who can write software other people can depend on. It’s also the textbook backbone for the examples in my systems-code-examples repository, so readers of the book and users of that repo are working from the same foundation.

Citation#

Link: https://www.routledge.com/Intermediate-C-Programming/Lu-Thiruvathukal/p/book/9781032189819

Lu, Yung-Hsiang, and George K. Thiruvathukal. Intermediate C Programming. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2024.

@book{lu_intermediate_2024,
  author    = {Lu, Yung-Hsiang and Thiruvathukal, George K.},
  title     = {Intermediate C Programming},
  edition   = {2nd},
  publisher = {Routledge},
  year      = {2024},
  isbn      = {9781032189819}
}
Contents