Syllabus 2007/2008 EDA150

Syllabus academic year 2007/2008

C PROGRAMMING

EDA150

Higher education credits: 3. Grading scale: UG. Level: G1 (First level). Language of instruction: The course will be given in Swedish. Optional for: C4, D3, E3, F2, M3, N2, Pi3. Course coordinator: Jonas Skeppstedt, Jonas.Skeppstedt@cs.lth.se, Inst f datavetenskap. Prerequisites: An introductory programming course. The number of participants is limited to 100 Selection criteria: Credits awarded or credited within the study program. Assessment: Written examination. The compulsory programming assignments must have been completed before the exam. Home page: http://www.cs.lth.se/Education/Courses/.

Aim
The purpose of the course is that the student shall how to write program in the C programming language.

Knowledge and understanding
For a passing grade the student must

understand how memory is allocated and deallocated in C,
understand how pointers work and how they are used,
understand the type system of C, e.g. which type conversions are permitted and portable,
understand the meaning of undefined behaviour, implementation defined behaviour, and unspecified behaviour and when it is important to should think about them.

Skills and abilities
For a passing grade the student must

be able to write programs in the language C99,
be able to use the debugger GDB, and
be able to use the tool Valgrind for automatic detection of memory related errors.

Judgement and approach
For a passing grade the student must

be able to select the appropriate memory allocation method depending on the situation.

Contents
The course is web based and is given twice a year. The students solve the compulsory assignments on their own and submit their solutions via e-mail.

An overview of ISO C (C99). Basic C programming: types, program structures, functions. The preprocessor. Pointers. Memory handling: static allocation, stack allocation, heap allocation. The standard library. Portability, differences between ANSI C and C99. Program development tools: gcc, make, gdb, and Valgrind.

Literature
Recommended: Steele, G & Harbison, S: C: A Reference Manual, 5th Edition. Prentice Hall 2002. ISBN 0-13-122560X.