Top 10 List of Week 04

1. Writing and Using Shared Libraries (Article)
   This article shows you steps to build a shared libraries and how to incorporate them into your machine. The article starts at explaining about how shared library differs form static library. It is worth mentioning that shared library is not dependent on the address because the functions inside the shared library may be stored in different address. To mitigate that issue, try to use -fPIC flag when compiling codes that will use the shared library.

2. How Static and Dynamic Libraries affect Memory Usage (Paper)
   This master thesis talks about the difference between Static Libraries and Dynamic Libraries, and how both affect memory usage in a machine. The test was conducted on IP-STB embedded system, and was conducted to give quantitative analysis of how each Library use the memory and how it impact system performance. This is a very interesting read, I’d recommend you to read this.

3. Why microprocessors prefer Little Endian (Article)
   There’s a reason why microprocessors use little endian while networking protocol uses big endian. This article explains briefly the advantages of both formats and why both have their own places. Endian issues are an example of general encoding problem, basically.

4. How to manage memory with malloc, calloc, realloc, and free in C (Video)
   This video explains about memory management with malloc, calloc, realloc, and free. I love the way he explains with a sample code. You can try to run the sample code if you want to try it yourself. After all, learning by doing is always better imo. Go give it a try

5. What does the malloc do? (Video)
   Malloc is one of the magic function of the C language. This video explains thoroughly about how malloc works and how it finds new memory locations. The video starts on explaining a few C functions, and then proceed to explain how malloc utilize those lower function as if it’s doing some sort of sorcery.

6. Pointers in C(++) (Video)
   The video explains a lot about pointers. In my opinion, the explanation is very clear that I think I understand what pointers are. The video also poke around double pointers and how they reference double pointers. This video uses C++ for demonstration, but I think pointers on C++ and C are identical, and both language uses the saame concept to implement pointers.

7. Get the most out of the linker map file
   Mr. Ibam told us about how nasty map file is. But This article shows that map files are quite useful to debug better. I think it is better to learn more about it and see how it achieve it’s purpose directly. Experience is the best teacher, am I right?

8. Why pointers powerful and dangerous at the same time (Article)
   This article explains about pointers in C very thoroughly. I really really really recommend this if you’re still stuck at learning pointers. This is the most important, bookmark-worthy, article imo. The author explained pointers very well.

9. Advanced C Pointer Exercise (Practice)
   So you want to be a software engineer leet pointer coder? Go to this pointer exercise. Pick a question. Read the prompt. Recommended fot those who really wants to ace how pointers works. If DDP ever uses C, this would be the exam question imo.

10. Secure Memory Allocation in C and C++
    As you know from previous week. C are one of the most dangerous langauge. One of the reason is pointers. Pointers can be a double-edged sword if you don’t use it properly, and also be dangerous. This article covers how to mitigate the dangerous part of pointers, I really find this article helpful.

This has been a very rough week. Also I think I touched pointers too much, though I think it is the most important part of C lang.