Book Image

Hands-On System Programming with C++

By : Dr. Rian Quinn
Book Image

Hands-On System Programming with C++

By: Dr. Rian Quinn

Overview of this book

C++ is a general-purpose programming language with a bias toward system programming as it provides ready access to hardware-level resources, efficient compilation, and a versatile approach to higher-level abstractions. This book will help you understand the benefits of system programming with C++17. You will gain a firm understanding of various C, C++, and POSIX standards, as well as their respective system types for both C++ and POSIX. After a brief refresher on C++, Resource Acquisition Is Initialization (RAII), and the new C++ Guideline Support Library (GSL), you will learn to program Linux and Unix systems along with process management. As you progress through the chapters, you will become acquainted with C++'s support for IO. You will then study various memory management methods, including a chapter on allocators and how they benefit system programming. You will also explore how to program file input and output and learn about POSIX sockets. This book will help you get to grips with safely setting up a UDP and TCP server/client. Finally, you will be guided through Unix time interfaces, multithreading, and error handling with C++ exceptions. By the end of this book, you will be comfortable with using C++ to program high-quality systems.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Summary

In this chapter, we learned how to open a file in different ways, depending on how we plan to use the file itself. Once opened, we learned how to read and write to the file using the std::fstream C++ APIs.

We learned the difference between fields and bytes, and the advantages and disadvantages of both methods of reading and writing, as well as common unsafe practices. In addition, we learned about support functions that provide the ability to move pointers within the std::fstream APIs to manipulate how a file is read and written.

Furthermore, in this chapter, we gave an extensive overview of the new filesystem APIs added to C++17, including paths and their support functions for manipulating files and directories.

We concluded this chapter with three examples. In the first we wrote a logger to redirect the output of std::clog to a log file and stdout. The second example...