Book Image

Beginning C++ Programming

By : Richard Grimes
Book Image

Beginning C++ Programming

By: Richard Grimes

Overview of this book

C++ has come a long way and is now adopted in several contexts. Its key strengths are its software infrastructure and resource-constrained applications, including desktop applications, servers, and performance-critical applications, not to forget its importance in game programming. Despite its strengths in these areas, beginners usually tend to shy away from learning the language because of its steep learning curve. The main mission of this book is to make you familiar and comfortable with C++. You will finish the book not only being able to write your own code, but more importantly, you will be able to read other projects. It is only by being able to read others' code that you will progress from a beginner to an advanced programmer. This book is the first step in that progression. The first task is to familiarize you with the structure of C++ projects so you will know how to start reading a project. Next, you will be able to identify the main structures in the language, functions, and classes, and feel confident being able to identify the execution flow through the code. You will then become aware of the facilities of the standard library and be able to determine whether you need to write a routine yourself, or use an existing routine in the standard library. Throughout the book, there is a big emphasis on memory and pointers. You will understand memory usage, allocation, and access, and be able to write code that does not leak memory. Finally, you will learn about C++ classes and get an introduction to object orientation and polymorphism.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Using strings

The example will read in emails as a text file and processed. An email in Internet message format will be in two parts: the header and message body. This is simple processing, so no attempt is carried out to process MIME email body formatting (although this code can be used as a starting point for that). The email body will start after the first blank line, and Internet standards say that lines should be no longer than 78 characters. If they are longer they must not be longer than 998 characters. This means that newlines (carriage return, linefeed pairs) are used to maintain this rule, and that an end of paragraph is indicated by a blank line.

Headers are more complicated. In their simplest form, a header is on a single line and is in the form name:value. The header name is separated from the header value by a colon. A header may be split over more than one line...