C foundations: under the hood Now that you have built apps, go one level down to see what happens inside the machine: C, pointers and memory, data structures and sorting. Harder than Python, but it explains why everything you built works.
Lessons 0 Overview Now that you have built and shipped your first apps, you go under the hood: how the system, the shell and containers work inside, then C with its pointers, dynamic memory, data structures and sorting. 1 Computer Systems, the Shell, and Docker A bridge before C: what happens behind any program you run, from files, permissions and the shell to processes and memory, and how containers isolate the runtime. 2 First Steps in the C Language From high-level interpreted languages to compiled C, close to the hardware, where you really start to understand what happens when a program runs. 3 Performance & Visual Debugging Labs Before diving into C's complexities you build two professional habits: measuring code performance instead of guessing it, and watching it run step by step instead of guessing where the bug is. 4 Pointers, Arrays, and Strings Pointers are what sets C apart: instead of values alone you deal directly with the addresses where they live in memory, together with arrays and strings. 5 Dynamic Memory Management In C you are responsible for requesting memory and giving it back; there is no garbage collector doing it for you as in Python or JavaScript. 6 Debugging and Memory Security Now that you manage memory by hand, you need tools that catch its mistakes before they turn into vulnerabilities or crashes in production. 7 Core Data Structures in C C has no ready-made data structures like Python's lists and dicts, so you build yourself the structures every high-level language relies on inside. 8 Sorting and Complexity Analysis Your first formal tool for comparing solutions with numbers instead of "this feels faster", and your first family of sorting algorithms. 9 Wrap-up and resources The best outside resources for these lessons, classified by kind and level. All are open to everyone and need no account on any platform. Use the filters to narrow the list.