C Mastery Roadmap: From Advanced to Chad-Level

🛠️ Phase 1: Mastery of Internals (Advanced Systems Foundations)

Memory Management

• Manual malloc/free basics
• Write your own dynamic array
• Use and abuse memcpy, memset, memmove
• Write your own malloc/free using a freelist
• Add sbrk()/mmap()-backed pages
• Implement slab allocator / buddy system
• Add malloc metadata corruption detection

File & Process Primitives

• Learn mmap, munmap, mprotect, fork, execve, pipe, dup2
• Signal handling: sigaction, sigsetjmp, siglongjmp
• IPC: shared memory, message queues, UNIX sockets

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⚙️ Phase 2: Operating System and Runtime Awareness

Deep Dive Projects

• ELF Loader (parse and simulate ELF loading and symbol resolution)
• Write a toy libc with puts, malloc, printf
• Simulate system calls (via ptrace or LD_PRELOAD)

Concepts to Internalize

• Calling conventions: x86-64 ABI
• Stack frames and prologue/epilogue mechanics
• Register calling vs stack calling
• Function pointer dispatch and vtable simulation
• GOT/PLT, relocations, and dynamic linking

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🧨 Phase 3: Exploitation Awareness and Defense

Exploit Simulations

• Use-after-free
• Stack overflow → return address overwrite
• Heap overflow → fake chunk & tcache poisoning
• Format string → arbitrary write/read
• ROP chain with setuid(0); execve("/bin/sh",...)

Hardened Defense:

• Compile with stack canaries (-fstack-protector)
• Enable PIE/ASLR (-fPIE, -pie)
• Enable RELRO (-Wl,-z,relro,-z,now)
• Use Valgrind, AddressSanitizer, GDB, strace, ltrace

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🖥️ Phase 4: Bare Metal & Embedded

Low-Level Hardware Work

• Write a bootloader in C (link with NASM)
• Blink an LED with C on a microcontroller (e.g., STM32 or AVR)
• Access hardware registers and I/O memory directly
• Use linker scripts to control memory layout

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🧰 Phase 5: Build Real Stuff

Projects

• Write a memory allocator ✅
• Make a game engine or emulator (CHIP-8, NES, etc.)
• Implement a minimal TCP/IP stack (raw sockets or userland)
• Write a Forth or Lisp interpreter in C
• Build a kernel module or bootable OS with multitasking

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📚 Resources

Topic	Resource
Linux Internals	The Linux Programming Interface by Michael Kerrisk
Linkers/Loaders	Linkers and Loaders by John R. Levine
Exploitation	Hacking: The Art of Exploitation by Jon Erickson
Embedded	Embedded C by Michael Pont
C Idioms	21st Century C by Ben Klemens
Tooling	readelf, objdump, gdb, valgrind, ltrace, strace

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🧙 Phase 6: Final Boss Level – Craft and Combat

• Build a language that compiles to C
• Write a JIT compiler (e.g., for a stack-based VM)
• Write a debugger using ptrace()
• Implement cooperative multitasking/scheduler
• Write a file system in userspace with FUSE

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"If it ain't got pointers, it's just scripting."

Phase 3: Advanced Topics

1. Advanced Pointers -Pointer to pointer (double pointers) -Function pointers and their use cases -Pointers and dynamic data structures (linked lists, trees) -Pointer-related issues (dangling, wild, and null pointers)

2. Data Structures in C -Linked lists (singly, doubly, circular) -Stacks and queues (implementation using arrays and linked lists) -Trees (binary trees, binary search trees) -Graphs (basic introduction, adjacency matrix, and list) -Hashing (hash tables, collision resolution techniques)

3. Advanced Memory Management -Memory allocation strategies (stack vs. heap) -Custom memory allocators -Garbage collection basics -Implementing memory pools

4. Preprocessor Directives -Macros and macro functions -Conditional compilation -Include guards and the use of #define (it is not a hashtag 😅) -Creating and using header files

Phase 4: Expert-Level Topics

1. Advanced C Concepts -Bitwise manipulation and operations -Working with hardware and low-level programming (registers, ports) -Writing and using inline assembly within C -Creating and using libraries (static and dynamic) -Interfacing with other languages (e.g., using C in Python with ctypes)

2. Concurrency in C -Introduction to concurrency and parallelism -Multithreading with pthreads (POSIX threads) -Synchronization (mutexes, semaphores, condition variables) -Thread safety and race conditions

3. Network Programming in C -Sockets and socket programming -Client-server architecture -TCP/IP and UDP protocols -Handling multiple clients (select, poll, epoll)

4. Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOS) -Basics of RTOS and their use cases -Writing programs for RTOS -Inter-task communication -Task scheduling and real-time constraints

Phase 5: Mastery and Specialization

1. Algorithms and Data Structures in C -Sorting and searching algorithms -Dynamic programming and greedy algorithms -Graph algorithms (Dijkstra, A*, DFS, BFS) -Advanced data structures (trie, AVL trees, red-black trees)

2. System Programming -Understanding OS-level concepts (processes, threads, memory management) -Writing system-level programs (creating and managing processes, IPC) -Unix/Linux system calls (fork, exec, pipe, signals) -Working with the Linux kernel

3. Embedded Systems Programming -Basics of embedded systems and microcontrollers -Programming microcontrollers in C -Interfacing with peripherals (GPIO, UART, SPI, I2C) -Writing device drivers

4. Optimization and Debugging -Code profiling and optimization techniques -Using debugging tools (gdb, valgrind) -Writing and running test cases -Optimizing for memory and performance

Phase 6: Project-Based Learning

1. Small Projects -Implementing a basic shell -Creating a simple text editor -Building a basic HTTP server

2. Medium Projects -Developing a database management system (miniature) -Writing a networked chat application -Implementing a simple operating system kernel

3. Large Projects -Contributing to open-source C projects (e.g., the Linux kernel) -Writing your own C compiler or interpreter -Creating a fully-featured real-time operating system