Book Image

The C++ Workshop

By : Dale Green, Kurt Guntheroth, Shaun Ross Mitchell
Book Image

The C++ Workshop

By: Dale Green, Kurt Guntheroth, Shaun Ross Mitchell

Overview of this book

C++ is the backbone of many games, GUI-based applications, and operating systems. Learning C++ effectively is more than a matter of simply reading through theory, as the real challenge is understanding the fundamentals in depth and being able to use them in the real world. If you're looking to learn C++ programming efficiently, this Workshop is a comprehensive guide that covers all the core features of C++ and how to apply them. It will help you take the next big step toward writing efficient, reliable C++ programs. The C++ Workshop begins by explaining the basic structure of a C++ application, showing you how to write and run your first program to understand data types, operators, variables and the flow of control structures. You'll also see how to make smarter decisions when it comes to using storage space by declaring dynamic variables during program runtime. Moving ahead, you'll use object-oriented programming (OOP) techniques such as inheritance, polymorphism, and class hierarchies to make your code structure organized and efficient. Finally, you'll use the C++ standard library?s built-in functions and templates to speed up different programming tasks. By the end of this C++ book, you will have the knowledge and skills to confidently tackle your own ambitious projects and advance your career as a C++ developer.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Summary

In this chapter, we've covered some further topics on OOP, starting with inheritance. We saw how we can use this to define behaviors in a base class, then inherit from that to create a derived class. Our derived classes specialize these more generic base classes, inheriting any public and protected members while defining their own as well. We can go on to create chains of inheritance or inherit from more than one class at a time to create complex objects.

We then looked at virtual member functions. When we declare functions in base classes, we can mark them as virtual, meaning their implementation can be overridden. Derived classes can provide their own implementations for virtual functions, should they wish to. If, however, a function is marked as pure virtual—and thus the base class is abstract—then the deriving class must provide a definition or become abstract as well.

This led to polymorphism and type casting. With objects that share a similar...