Looking for advanced C programming book

Question

I need a book that deals with implementing real projects in C, in contrast to "C Programming Language" which I recently finished reading and mastered, that only teaches the language. Something that deals with advanced topics such as: how to organize the source files, how to organize headers, more advanced preprocessing directive like #ifndef, #ifdef and how and when to use them. How to deal with various kinds of input, how to parse it, etc.

I already have these books, but none of them is what I'm looking for (although they're good ones):

• C Traps and Pitfalls by Andrew Koenig
• Expert C Programming by Peter van der Linden
• C Programming Language (2nd Edition) (Prentice Hall Software) by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie
• The Standard C Library by P.J. Plauger

Answer 1

I honestly don't think you will find any more "advanced" books than the ones you list, except when it comes to special areas like sockets, databases, GUIs etc. C is really not a very complicated language.

Answer 2

To be honest, I learned most of that stuff by checking out the source code to real projects written in C (after reading K&R, of course). If you browse through a few C projects of appropriate size and quality, you'll quickly pick up on the standard ways to organize source and header files, and you'll see how "real" programmers use the preprocessor.

Answer 3

I think the knowledge you're looking for is to be found not in books about C but in books and articles about system design. These are fairly thin on the ground, unfortunately. You might consider

• Abstraction and Specification in Program Development by Barbara Liskov and John Guttag (not the newer Java-based version by Liskov alone). It is an undergraduate text but has some ideas worth thinking about.

• Books from the late 1970s and early 1980s by Yourdon and Myers on structured design (one is called Composite/Structured Design.

• For an example of how to organize a big C project as a bunch of useful libraries, you can't beat C Interfaces and Implementations](http://www.cs.princeton.edu/software/cii/) by Dave Hanson. Basically Hanson took all the code he'd written as part of building Icon and lcc and pulled out the best bits in a form that other people could reuse for their own projects. It's a model of good C programming using modern design techniques (including Liskov's data abstraction).