Advanced C Systems Programming Course – Africa

Course outline and learning expectations

This is a tutor-led course. The outline shows what your tutor will cover; teaching materials and examinations are provided directly to enrolled students.

What you will learn

• By the end of the course, the learner will be able to:
• Reason accurately about storage duration, linkage, qualifiers, translation units and the C object model.
• Identify and eliminate undefined, unspecified and implementation-defined behaviour.
• Design stable C interfaces using opaque types, callbacks and explicit ownership contracts.
• Create purpose-built arenas or pools and justify when they are appropriate.
• Write portable code for binary data, bit operations, alignment, byte order and serialization.
• Apply secure C practices to integers, arrays, strings, memory and error paths.
• Measure performance with sound benchmarks and make evidence-based optimisation decisions.
• Use compiler diagnostics, sanitizers, debuggers and static analysis as a quality gate.
• Deliver a portable C library and command-line client with tests, documentation and a reproducible build.

Modules

1. 1

   Precise C semantics

   Translation units and phases of translation.Scope, linkage and storage duration.`const`, `volatile` and `restrict`.Declarations, definitions and type compatibility.Practice: analyse surprising but standards-relevant code.
2. 2

   Undefined behaviour and portability

   Undefined, unspecified and implementation-defined behaviour.Integer promotions, conversions and overflow.Pointer validity, aliasing and alignment.Portable assumptions and compile-time checks.Practice: harden non-portable code.
3. 3

   Professional C API and library design

   Opaque structures and information hiding.Ownership, borrowing and lifetime contracts.Function pointers, callbacks and context pointers.Error models, result reporting and documentation.Practice: design a small public C API.
4. 4

   Advanced memory architecture

   Allocation strategy and data lifetime.Arenas, pools and object reuse.Cleanup design and failure atomicity.Measuring memory use and allocation cost.Practice: implement and test a bounded arena allocator.
5. 5

   Bits, bytes and data representation

   Bitwise operations and masks.Object representation, padding and alignment.Byte order and portable encoding.Safe binary serialization and parsing.Practice: define and validate a compact file format.
6. 6

   Secure and defensive C

   Bounds, strings and size calculations.Integer and allocation safety.Input validation and error paths.Applying selected SEI CERT C rules to code reviews.Practice: security review and repair lab.
7. 7

   Performance, diagnostics and quality gates

   Build fair microbenchmarks.Algorithm choice, memory layout and cache-aware thinking.Compiler optimisation levels and their effects.Profiling before optimisation.Sanitizers, static analysis and warning-clean builds.Practice: measure, improve and defend one optimisation.
8. 8

   Capstone project

   Deliver a portable C library plus a command-line client.Suggested contexts: compact record storage, telemetry processing, data validation or transaction-log analysis.Final technical presentation and code review.