The Definitive Guide to GCC is a comprehensive tutorial and guide to using GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection. GCC is quite simply the most-used and most powerful tool for programmers on the planet. GCC has long been available for most major hardware and operating system platforms and is often the preferred compiler for those platforms. As a general-purpose compiler, GCC produces higher quality, faster performing executable code with fewer bugs than equivalent offerings supplied by hardware and software vendors. GCC, along with GNU Emacs, the Linux operating system, the Apache web server, the Sendmail mail server, and the BIND DNS server, is one of the showpieces of the free software world and proof that sometimes you can get a free lunch.
In The Definitive Guide to GCC, authors William von Hagen and Kurt Wall teach you how to build, install, customize, use, and troubleshoot GCC 3.2. This guide goes beyond just command-line invocations to show you how to use GCC to improve the quality of your code (with debugging, code profiling, and test code coverage), and how to integrate other GNU development tools, such as libtool, automake, and autoconf, into your GCC-based development projects.