Book Image

C++ Fundamentals

By : Antonio Mallia, Francesco Zoffoli
Book Image

C++ Fundamentals

By: Antonio Mallia, Francesco Zoffoli

Overview of this book

C++ Fundamentals begins by introducing you to the C++ compilation model and syntax. You will then study data types, variable declaration, scope, and control flow statements. With the help of this book, you'll be able to compile fully working C++ code and understand how variables, references, and pointers can be used to manipulate the state of the program. Next, you will explore functions and classes — the features that C++ offers to organize a program — and use them to solve more complex problems. You will also understand common pitfalls and modern best practices, especially the ones that diverge from the C++98 guidelines. As you advance through the chapters, you'll study the advantages of generic programming and write your own templates to make generic algorithms that work with any type. This C++ book will guide you in fully exploiting standard containers and algorithms, understanding how to pick the appropriate one for each problem. By the end of this book, you will not only be able to write efficient code but also be equipped to improve the readability, performance, and maintainability of your programs.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)
C++ Fundamentals
Preface

Declaring and Defining a Class


A class is a way to combine data and operations together to create new types that can be used to represent complex concepts.

Basic types can be composed to create more meaningful abstractions. For example, location data is composed of latitude and longitude coordinates, which are represented as float values. With such a representation, when our code needs to operate on a location, we would have to provide both the latitude and longitude as separate variables. This is error-prone, as we might forget to pass one of the two variables, or we could provide them in the wrong order.

Additionally, computing the distance between two coordinates is a complex task and we don't want to write the same code again and again. It becomes even more difficult when we use more complex objects.

Continuing our example on Coordinates, instead of using operations on two float types, we can define a type, which stores the location and provides the necessary operations to interact with...