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)

Inheritance and composition

The classes you have seen so far are complete classes: you can create an instance of the class on the free store or the stack. You can do this because the data members of the class have been defined and so it is possible to calculate how much memory is needed for the object, and you have provided the full functionality of the class. These are called concrete classes.

If you have a routine in a class that proves useful and you want to reuse in a new class, you have a few choices. The first is called composition. With composition you add an instance of your utility class as a data member of the classes that will use the routine. A simple example is the string class--this provides all the functionality that you want from a string. It will allocate memory according to how many characters have to be stored and deallocate the memory it uses when the string...