C Pointers: Secrets every Embedded Engineer MUST know!

Designed by Silicon industry veterans (MAANG Engineers), Learn to use C pointers like professional - the way to visualize, think about and reason about pointers like experts do.

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Piyush Itankar, Dev Bishnoi, Rajat Batra, Mahmad Bharmal, Wasim Akram

C Pointers and my career graph!

Why should you learn

C Pointers ?

Memory Management Issues: Understanding pointers is crucial for managing memory efficiently in C. Without proper knowledge of pointers, developers may struggle with memory leaks, buffer overflows, or other memory-related bugs.

Difficulty in Working with Complex Data Structures: Pointers are essential for working with complex data structures like linked lists, trees, graphs, etc. Without a good understanding of pointers, manipulating such data structures becomes challenging, leading to inefficient or incorrect code.

Limited Ability to Interface with External Libraries: Many external libraries and APIs written in C require knowledge of pointers for passing data between the application and the library. Without understanding pointers, interfacing with such libraries becomes difficult.

Inefficient Code: Pointers are often used to optimize code by passing references instead of copying large data structures. Without using pointers effectively, developers may end up with less efficient code.

Debugging Challenges: Debugging C programs without understanding pointers can be particularly challenging. Pointers introduce complexities such as segmentation faults or accessing invalid memory locations, which can be difficult to debug for someone unfamiliar with pointers.

Difficulty in Understanding Existing Code: Many C programs extensively use pointers. Without understanding pointers, developers may struggle to understand and modify existing codebases, leading to maintenance issues.

What is the Cost of not mastering C Pointers ?

Missed Learning Opportunities: Understanding pointers is fundamental for many advanced programming concepts. Without grasping this crucial aspect of C programming, students may struggle to comprehend more complex topics, hindering their overall learning progress.

Career Limitations: Many job opportunities in software development require proficiency in C programming, including a solid understanding of pointers. By neglecting to learn this essential concept, students may limit their career prospects and miss out on valuable job opportunities.

Difficulty in Debugging: Pointer-related errors are common in C programming. Without proper knowledge of pointers, students may find it challenging to debug their code, leading to frustration and wasted time spent troubleshooting issues.

Inefficient Code: Pointers are often used to optimize code and improve performance. Without understanding pointers, students may write inefficient code that consumes more memory or executes slower than necessary.

Limited Collaboration: Collaborating with peers on projects becomes difficult when students lack a foundational understanding of pointers. Miscommunications and misunderstandings may arise, hindering teamwork and project success.

Long-term Skill Development: Learning pointers isn't just about passing exams; it's about building a strong foundation for future learning and skill development. Neglecting to learn pointers now may result in gaps in knowledge that become increasingly challenging to fill as students progress in their academic and professional careers.

Why should you buy this course ?

Embedded and Systems Engineer's growth is usually limited by the lack of understanding of how pointers work. Not knowing the mechanics of how pointers operate and how to use them in design is seen to hurt the credibility and stun the career growth.

Designed by Silicon industry veterans, this course will enable you to think and use pointers like a professional senior/staff engineer - the way to visualise, think about and reason about pointers like experts do.

The course takes a detailed hands on approach, explaining the code, the theory and the underlying system details one should consider when dealing with pointers in C. It is full of graphics, annotation and hands on demo that the students can try along in GitHub Codespaces.

By the end of the course you would have learned:

What pointers are, how to think about them and how to design with them.

Different types of pointers - Datatype based, void and function (callbacks) pointers.

Understand and use the syntax associated with pointers, the meaning of *, ., -> and & in contex of the pointer.

To reason about Multilevel pointers, Arrays and the difference between the two.

To use Pointer Arithmetic and different ways to dereference pointers.

To reasons about errors, fatalities resulting from the incorrect use of pointers.

How opensource code uses pointers - Baremetal, FreeRTOS and Linux file operations.

Course Preview

Course curriculum

78 Sessions

•

59 Lessons / Assignments

•

5h 21m total length

Module 1

Mental Models, Motivation and Reasoning about pointers

What to Imagine?

Assignment - 1

What is a pointer?

Assignment - 2

Why pointers ?

Assignment -3

Module 2

Pointers: Syntax and Code

Environment Setup

Declaring/Defining a Pointer

Assignment - 4

Pointer Variable and Address

* and & in relation to pointer variable

Declaration and Definition

Assignment - 5

Module 3

Multi-level Pointers

Use of * and &

Assignment - 6

Array and Pointers - Similarity and differences

Assignment - 7

Many *s and Many &s

Assignment - 8

pointer to pointer

Assignment - 9

Array of pointers

Assignment - 10

Different types of Pointers

Assignment - 11

Module 4

Pointer to Data

Pointing to data with a Datatype

Assignment - 12

Pointer to a struct, *, . and ->

Assignment - 13

Pointer Arithmetic

Memory model and pointer to data

Assignment - 14

Module 5

Pointer to code - Function pointers or Callback

What is a function pointer?

Function pointers syntax

Assignment - 15

Typedef and function pointers

Assignment - 16

Example - function pointer array

Assignment - 17

Module 6

Void Pointer

What is a void pointer?

Assignment - 18

What is NULL and NULL pointer?

Assignment - 19

Void pointers in - Linux source code

Module 7

Pointers, Dynamic allocation and problems

heap: malloc() and free()

Allocation failure

Assignment - 20

Memory Leak

Assignment - 21

Dangling Pointer

Assignment - 22

Double free()

Assignment - 23

Pointer manipulation and unowned memory

Assignment - 24

Module 8

Open Source code and Pointers

Baremetal Code

FreeRTOS

Linux

C Pointers: Secrets every Embedded Engineer MUST know!

Instructed by Piyush Itankar

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C Pointers: Secrets every Embedded Engineer MUST know!

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