introduction-network-programming-c

learn the basics of building I/O-heavy systems, in C

Acknowledgements

This repo borrows heavily from Jae Woo Lee's (Columbia University) COMS W3157 Advanced Programming and Mirela Damian's (Villanova) POSIX Threads.

Target Audience

This course is designed for professional web application developers who write software on an Apple computer. No prior knowledge of C is required, but it will help.

What Are You Going to Learn?

You're going to learn the basics of C programming. You're going to learn why garbage collection is really useful. You're going to learn why closures are great, and why parametric polymorphism is good. You're going to learn why forking web servers use so much memory compared to threaded web servers. You're going to learn why Node.js can get so much concurrency out of a single thread. You're going to learn a lot of other stuff too - trust me, it's going to be great.

Books You'll Need

A copy of The C Programming Language, 2nd Edition is required for this course, as is a copy of Unix Network Programming: The Sockets Networking Api, Volume 1, 3rd Edition.

Lecture notes can be found in each session's directory. The notes are a bit spartan, so you'll likely need to do some digging on your own to fill in the gaps of what's been communicated.

Sessions

1: Bytes and Encodings (notes, assignment)
2: Pointers and Arrays (notes, assignment)
3: Structs (notes, assignment)
4: File I/O (notes, assignment)
5: Socket Basics (notes, assignment)
6: Forking Processes and IPC (notes, assignment)
7: POSIX Threads (notes, assignment)
8: I/O Multiplexing with Poll (notes, assignment)

Tools

This project uses CMake to build things, install things, and to run the tests. You can download CMake from wherever you like.

To detect memory leaks, we need Valgrind. To run Valgrind, we need Linux. To run Linux from OSX, we need Docker. Thus, you'll want Docker on your Mac. You can download Docker from wherever you like.

I use CLion, the JetBrains product of IntelliJ fame, to write C. It knows about CMake, does code completion, etc. You don't have to use it, but I recommend that you do.

Building

Run the build.sh script from within a session's directory, e.g.

cd 1-intro-to-c && ./build.sh

Run Tests

You'll need Python 2.x to run the tests. Run the run-tests.sh script from within a session's directory, e.g.

cd 1-intro-to-c && ./run-tests.sh

Note that this script performs a build and installs any system libraries and runtime dependencies before running tests.

Run Leak Detector

A leak checker is provided for you (for the first few exercises, anyways). It uses Docker, because Valgrind doesn't work on OSX. To run the leak detector, ensure that a Docker agent is running and then run the detect-leaks.sh script from within a session's directory, e.g.

cd 1-intro-to-c && ./detect-leaks.sh

This will build your code in a Docker container, run Valgrind against it, and report back with any leaks.

laser/intro-network-programming-c