C Interfaces and Implementations: Techniques for Creating Reusable Software, David R. Hanson
http://www.informit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0201498413
This book does an excellent job of covering your question. It's in the Addison Wesley Professional Computing series.
The basic paradigm is something like this:
/* for data structure foo */
FOO *myfoo;
myfoo = foo_create(...);
foo_something(myfoo, ...);
myfoo = foo_append(myfoo, ...);
foo_delete(myfoo);