Book Image

Boost C++ Application Development Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Anton Polukhin Alekseevic
Book Image

Boost C++ Application Development Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Anton Polukhin Alekseevic

Overview of this book

If you want to take advantage of the real power of Boost and C++ and avoid the confusion about which library to use in which situation, then this book is for you. Beginning with the basics of Boost C++, you will move on to learn how the Boost libraries simplify application development. You will learn to convert data such as string to numbers, numbers to string, numbers to numbers and more. Managing resources will become a piece of cake. You’ll see what kind of work can be done at compile time and what Boost containers can do. You will learn everything for the development of high quality fast and portable applications. Write a program once and then you can use it on Linux, Windows, MacOS, Android operating systems. From manipulating images to graphs, directories, timers, files, networking – everyone will find an interesting topic. Be sure that knowledge from this book won’t get outdated, as more and more Boost libraries become part of the C++ Standard.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Using a true random number generator


I know of many examples of commercial products that use incorrect methods for getting random numbers. It's a shame that some companies still use rand() in cryptography and banking software.

Let's see how to get a fully random uniform distribution using Boost.Random that is suitable for banking software.

Getting started

Basic knowledge of C++ is required for this recipe. Knowledge about different types of distributions will also be helpful. The code in this recipe requires linking against the boost_random library.

How to do it...

To create a true random number, we need some help from the operating system or processor. This is how it can be done using Boost:

  1. We need to include the following headers:
#include <boost/config.hpp> 
#include <boost/random/random_device.hpp> 
#include <boost/random/uniform_int_distribution.hpp>
  1. Advanced random bits providers have different names under different platforms:
int main() {
    static const std::string provider...