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Richard Martin Reese

Understanding and Using C Pointers: Core Techniques for Memory Management 1st Edition

by Richard M Reese (Author)

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Improve your programming through a solid understanding of C pointers and memory management. With this practical book, you’ll learn how pointers provide the mechanism to dynamically manipulate memory, enhance support for data structures, and enable access to hardware. Author Richard Reese shows you how to use pointers with arrays, strings, structures, and functions, using memory models throughout the book.

Difficult to master, pointers provide C with much flexibility and power—yet few resources are dedicated to this data type. This comprehensive book has the information you need, whether you’re a beginner or an experienced C or C++ programmer or developer.

Get an introduction to pointers, including the declaration of different pointer types
Learn about dynamic memory allocation, de-allocation, and alternative memory management techniques
Use techniques for passing or returning data to and from functions
Understand the fundamental aspects of arrays as they relate to pointers
Explore the basics of strings and how pointers are used to support them
Examine why pointers can be the source of security problems, such as buffer overflow
Learn several pointer techniques, such as the use of opaque pointers, bounded pointers and, the restrict keyword

ISBN-10

1449344186
ISBN-13

978-1449344184
Edition

1st
Publisher

O'Reilly Media
Publication date

May 28, 2013
Language

English
Dimensions

7 x 0.48 x 9.19 inches
Print length

226 pages
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Editorial Reviews

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Q&A with Richard Reese, author of "Understanding and Using C Pointers"

Q. Why is your book timely?

A. The C language continues to be a popular and widely used language. In addition, there are millions of lines of C code being maintained. Pointers are central to C and a solid understanding of them is important in crafting reliable and secure software. Understanding C pointers has always been important but they have not always been adequately covered. Their widespread usage in new and old applications begs a complete and comprehensive coverage.

Q. What do you hope that readers of your book will walk away with?

A. I hope that the experienced developer will be able to fill any holes in their understanding of C pointers. I hope that the less experienced developers will become more proficient and confident in their application of pointers.

Q. Can you give us a few tips on using pointers?

Be careful when using pointers to void. If you cast a pointer to a pointer to void there is nothing preventing you from casting it to a different pointer type.
When using function pointers the programmer must be careful to ensure it is used properly because C does not check to see if the correct parameters are passed.
New code development should use the restrict keyword with most pointer declarations. This will enable better code optimization. Modifying existing code may not be worth the effort.
Compilers do not always do a good job at reporting alias-related warnings. They can sometimes miss aliases and may sometimes report alias problems where they don't exist. It is ultimately up to the programmer to identify alias conditions.
Remember NULL and NUL are different. NULL is used as a special pointer and is typically defined as ((void*)0). NUL is a char and is defined as '\0'. They should not be used interchangeably.
Improperly aligned pointers can result in an abnormal program termination or retrieval of bad data. In addition, slower pointer access is possible if the compiler is required to generate additional machine code to compensate for the improper alignment.

About the Author

Richard Reese has worked in the industry and academics for the past 29 years. For 10 years he provided software development support at Lockheed and at one point developed a C based network application. He was a contract instructor providing software training to industry for 5 years. Richard is currently an Associate Professor at Tarleton State University in Stephenville Texas.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ O'Reilly Media; 1st edition (May 28, 2013)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 226 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1449344186
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1449344184
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7 x 0.48 x 9.19 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #237,390 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #6 in Memory Management Algorithms
- #31 in C Programming Language
- #63 in C++ Programming Language

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Richard Reese
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Richard Reese has worked in both industry and academics. For 17 years he worked in the telephone and aerospace industries, serving in several capacities including research and development, software development, supervision, and training. He currently teaches at Tarleton State University, where he has the opportunity to apply his years of industry experience to enhance his teaching.
Richard has written several Java books and a C Pointer book. He uses a concise and easy-to-follow approach to topics at hand. His Java books have addressed EJB 3.1, updates to Java 7 and 8, Certification, jMonkeyEngine, Natural Language Processing, Function programming, and Networks.
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Richard Martin Reese
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Richard Reese enjoys writing books and teaching. He has worked in industry for over 16 years and is currently an Associate Professor at Tarleton State University. He works his garden when he can and built a glass greenhouse to winter his plants.
Richard has written 5 books, four dealing with Java and one that addresses C Pointers. His latest book is Java 8 New Features - A Practical Heads-up Guide with p8tech. His next book will be about jMonkeyEngine, a system for developing 3D games in Java.
Many years ago he served in the United States Air Force in a couple of capacities, his last being a UHF/VHF radio technician for Titan II missile silos. He left the Air Force and earned a Bachelor and Masters Degree in Computer Science from Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches Texas. The next year he worked for GTE in Phoenix Arizona participating in the development of a class 5 telephone switch. Next, he went to Texas A&M University where he earned his doctorate in Computer Science in 1983.
Upon graduation he became an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Stephen F. Austin State University for three years before returning to industry. He spent 10 years at GD/Lockheed in Fort Worth Texas working on several different programs. He spent the next 5 years as a contract trainer before returning to University life at Tarleton State University where he has been since 2002.
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Reese M. Richard
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Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5

179 global ratings

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4 star		21%
3 star		4%
2 star		1%
1 star		2%

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Alex

Great book for beginners

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 26, 2022

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Pointers are essential part of C and this book will help you to understand how to use pointers safely.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 31, 2013

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This book is a useful overview of what pointers are, how they work, and how they should be managed for security and effectiveness. It is great to have a recent book devoted entirely to pointers. Many books on C either scant the topic, or deal with woefully out of date C standards. Reese takes into account the current C11 standard, which alone makes it very welcome.

The book, however, has several flaws. A lot of the material deals with nonstandard libraries. For example, the section on pointers and threads mentions C11 support for threads, but then discusses the POSIX standard rather than going into any details about the C standard. I found this and other references to extensions outside the C standard annoying; a book about C should focus on portable code.

Also, the book is not well organized. Throughout the book there are "forward references" saying that the topic being mentioned will be discussed elsewhere later. This leads to a lot of back-and-forth flipping of pages. For example, pointer arithmetic is explained in Chapter 1, but is used only in Chapter 4; a particular data structure is minimally introduced on page 133, then actually used sixty pages later. The way information is presented and explained could have been more systematic.

The biggest flaw is that some of the code is nonstandard and frankly, quite ugly. For instance:
(1) a function on page 87 uses pointers to memory that has already been deallocated, which is undefined behavior. The same function has redundant variables "length" and "currentPosition" -- one of the two would have been sufficient to accomplish the task.
(2) Elsewhere, Reese defines a linked list header structure with pointers to the head node, the tail node, and the current node. This structure is used at several later points in the book, but the reason for including a pointer to the current node is never made clear; none of the code in the book ever uses it, and indeed, it's difficult to see why it would be useful.
(3) While Reese explains the difference between the value 0 and the NUL character, in several places his code elides the difference, using the former where the latter would be more strictly appropriate (e.g., page 131 has `while (*string != 0)` when `while (*string != '\0')` or preferably `while (*string)` would be better style.
(4) Throughout, the book provides examples of infinite loops with break statements instead of using good structured style and having the break condition be the loop conditional.
(5) Surprisingly for a book that mentions the C99 and C11 standards often, there are a lot of references to using Microsoft Visual C++ as a compiler. Microsoft does not, and by all accounts never will, support C standards past C89. It is a C++ compiler, not a current C compiler. It mandates practices that are not C like in their philosophy, and Reese's code succumbs. For instance, he explicitly casts the return values from malloc and realloc to pointers of the appropriate type, which is not considered good C style. Good C code should be written in compliance to the C standard, not in conformance with the requirements imposed by a compiler geared to a different language.

The chronically problematic sample code is a serious shortcoming, and would be quite misleading for relatively new programmers. But then, the book is more a review of programming techniques using pointers than an introduction to them. It is geared more towards intermediate or experienced programmers than towards novices. For someone who has enough experience to be able to refactor the code properly, the book is a very useful review.

74 people found this helpful

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Darrell R

The C book I wish I had when I was an undergrad!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 10, 2021

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I always had a bit of "brain cramp" when dealing with C pointers. This book taught me the trick of reading variable declarations from right to left. For example:

int *pi; // means "pi is a pointer to an int"

It clearly explains the use of the dereference operator in an lvalue:

*pi = 5 // The int 5 is assigned to memory location where pi points.

But it pointed out that this (very similar to the above) is a common error:

int *pi = 5; // We are declaring a pointer to an int, and then trying to assign the integer 5 to the pointer, not the integer memory location.

And that's all just in chapter 1! He helpfully diagrams memory after each use of pointers, making the difference between the stack, heap and the data segment (static memory) clear. There are detailed chapters on pointer use with dynamic memory, functions, arrays, strings, and structures.

It's nice to have an entire book focused entirely on pointers. The focused drill is clearing up confusion that plagued me for longer than I care to admit. Thank you!

2 people found this helpful

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gwilliams

After Dennis Ritchies original "C" book....This is the most Important Book on "C" I've read.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 9, 2018

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The only way to describe this book is "tremendous" !!! It is the best/most useful book about "C" I have read. Even though the scope of the book is studying "pointers", it covers it from A-Z very well. It is an area of "C" that is really needed. What it conveys and teaches is very necessary. It is a book that is necessary for all "C" programmers, engineers and students. It is very useful for anyone that writes "C" programs to have read and understood. Even if you just read and learn the sections you think are important, it is very useful. I would say that every "C" programmer should read and understand most of the book. This book was a great surprise for me, it invigorated me to learn more about the language. I would hope that all engineers and programmers would read and use the rules outlined in this book. Which would help them enjoy the power of "C" more often.
A really happy Michael Stolzle,

6 people found this helpful

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Allan Wind

Excellent but I didn't learn anything new

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 20, 2020

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The book is excellent, to the point, and covers pointers well. I didn't think it gave much justice to "Core Techniques for Memory Management". Things like let caller allocate memory so it's responsible for deallocation and to ensure malloc/free happens as the same level. If only the called function knows how much memory to allocate, add a feature so it can tell the caller how much memory that is (example sprintf). If caller knows the maximum size, then it might be fine to allocated too much memory, possible realloc later. Region based memory strategies. The c extensions of gcc, for instance, that allows you to associate cleanup attributes to a variable when it goes out of scope.

3 people found this helpful

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Rapid Logic

Must-read for every computer science student

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 26, 2013

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This is the best coverage of C pointers and memory management I have seen. Every computer science student should master this material and would benefit from doing so during the first course on C/C++ and before the systems programming courses.

All too common with math and theoretical CS authors, many or most of whom are professional educators, is the attitude that brevity is beauty. Whether they are interested in instilling their ideas in the reader is not evident from their writing. Reese provides the right level of detail and a coherent exposition which develops a solid intuition without having to re-read his explanations.

The conceptual diagrams are helpful but a little ambiguous in referencing which rectangle is the function stack, which is main, and which is the heap. I hope the author improves the diagrams in his next edition. I do not deduct any stars because this book is much better than anything else, and it covers essential CS material.

8 people found this helpful

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Max

Helped a 2nd Year Comp Sci

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 18, 2019

Verified Purchase

It does what it says on the time. Thought I better leave a *ptr to that. It does &address all the bases.

2 people found this helpful

Anonymous

Great Book On Pointers Even in 2018

Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on December 30, 2018

Verified Purchase

Great Book , I am thankful to the author. Very well written, only drawback is that it doesn't contain any practice. Reader has to work through to get the concepts, which makes the book difficult, but hey who is saying pointers is easy. Its not, hence we as reader we have to work hard. Great book and must read !!!

3 people found this helpful

Albertazzi Angelo

Completo

Reviewed in Italy 🇮🇹 on July 12, 2022

Verified Purchase

Mi serviva un ripasso sui puntatori. Questo libro oltre ad essere esaustivo sull'uso dei puntatori in C è ricco di esempi. Chiarisce molti aspetti in modo semplice. Altamente raccomandato.

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Barry Moss

Well written and very useful

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on March 2, 2019

Verified Purchase

My background is an FPGA engineer who occasionally needs to do a bit of C programming. Recently I got pulled into a major project with a lot of C programming and I found myself out my depth. This book helped bridge the gap between the C primer level of books and the type of pointer constructs being used regularly by C programming professionals. The book is well written and illustrated with sufficient examples to demonstrate all the concepts.

fradsham

Excellet book on C pointers

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on June 28, 2016

Verified Purchase

I have been a C# programmer for many years and I have been away from C since school. So the & and * of pointers scared me a little until I found this book. It explained it in very simple terms with good examples, even addressing security vulnerabilities that could be introduced with pointers.

It skips all the other stuff covered by intro books and focuses on the real advantage of using C over other languages (i.e. pointers). I would recommend this book for new programmers or just as a refresher to others (as in my case).

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