Book Image

Mastering the C++17 STL

By : Arthur O'Dwyer
Book Image

Mastering the C++17 STL

By: Arthur O'Dwyer

Overview of this book

Modern C++ has come a long way since 2011. The latest update, C++17, has just been ratified and several implementations are on the way. This book is your guide to the C++ standard library, including the very latest C++17 features. The book starts by exploring the C++ Standard Template Library in depth. You will learn the key differences between classical polymorphism and generic programming, the foundation of the STL. You will also learn how to use the various algorithms and containers in the STL to suit your programming needs. The next module delves into the tools of modern C++. Here you will learn about algebraic types such as std::optional, vocabulary types such as std::function, smart pointers, and synchronization primitives such as std::atomic and std::mutex. In the final module, you will learn about C++'s support for regular expressions and file I/O. By the end of the book you will be proficient in using the C++17 standard library to implement real programs, and you'll have gained a solid understanding of the library's own internals.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Promises about futures

If you haven't encountered concurrent programming topics before, the last few sections probably got progressively more and more challenging. Mutexes are pretty simple to understand because they model a familiar idea from daily life: getting exclusive access to some resource by putting a lock on it. Read-write locks (shared_mutex) aren't much harder to understand. However, we then took a significant jump upward in esotericism with condition variables--which are hard to grasp partly because they seem to model not a noun (like "padlock") but a sort of prepositional verb phrase: "sleep until, but also, wake." Their opaque name doesn't help much either.

Now we continue our journey into concurrent programming with a topic that may be unfamiliar even if you've taken an undergraduate course in concurrent programming, but is...