I assume that readers understand C at the level covered in undergraduate introductory programming courses, and have a working understanding of fundamental data structures at the level presented in texts like Algorithms in C . At Princeton, the material in this book is used in systems programming courses from the sophomore to first-year graduate levels. Many of the interfaces use advanced C programming techniques, such as opaque pointers and pointers to pointers, and thus serve as nontrivial examples of those techniques, which are useful in systems programming and data structure courses. This book can be used for courses in several ways, the simplest being in project-oriented courses. In a compiler course, for example, students often build a compiler for a toy language.
Substantial projects are common in graphics courses as well.
Many of the interfaces can simplify the projects in these kinds of courses by eliminating some of the grunt programming needed to get such projects off the ground. This usage helps students realize the enormous savings that reuse can bring to a project, and it often induces them to try interface-based design for their own parts of the project. Interfaces and implementations are the focus of Princeton's sophomore-level systems programming course. Assignments require students to be interface clients, implementors, and designers. In one assignment, for example, I distribute Section 8.1's Table interface, the object code for its implementation, and the specifications for Section 8.2's word frequency program, wf .