An Introduction to GCC Book

Found this by chance at a used bookstore. Unless you take a course in compilers or gravitate to manuals, you may be dogged by a feeling that you are perpetually unclear - and will forever be unclear - about those stages on the way to making an executable from C or C++ code: preprocessing, compiling, assembling, linking, optimizing, etc. You know, all the stuff a good IDE hides from you most of the time, until it doesn't.

My pressing questions were mainly about the different kinds of linking. I'd read many forum threads, blog articles, tutorials, and so on, but nothing I could find anywhere online was remotely as good as this book. It's around 100 pages in chapters of 100 percent pith. More to the point, it's the most pleasant and clarifying experience I could ever expect from a book about a compiler. There's probably tons not included, but the author always tells you where you can sink your fangs into a relevant manual, and you'll get many basic commands, flags, warnings, and error messages, along with a nice high-level sketch of the overall process from code to execution.

The book is exactly what it says, an introduction. It won't teach you how the compiler itself works - it's a user-level overview that will serve many people well as a mug-side reference. It won't teach you how to write C/++ either, though there are enough simple examples that it could help refresh your memory. What it will do is clear up the confusion about compiler and linker flags, header files, source files, object files, libraries, pathing, environment variables, symbol tables, optimization, architectures, and such ubiquitous concerns that can feel esoteric. The book will get you comfortable with what goes on underneath the IDE at the command line so that you won't be afraid of those settings. It covers the basics of makefiles but does not go into autotools or more advanced build automation. The book will leave you with a better sense of what goes on with other compiled languages, as C/++ has been such a standard for so long, and concepts like static and dynamic linking transcend language barriers.

Highly recommended if you're learning C/++ or getting back into it, and fun to read despite the serious focus. It actually helped me solve a technical problem I'd been struggling with, linking some C++ libraries to Java code via SWIG and JNI.