Book Image

Modern C++: Efficient and Scalable Application Development

By : Richard Grimes, Marius Bancila
Book Image

Modern C++: Efficient and Scalable Application Development

By: Richard Grimes, Marius Bancila

Overview of this book

C++ is one of the most widely used programming languages. It is fast, flexible, and used to solve many programming problems. This Learning Path gives you an in-depth and hands-on experience of working with C++, using the latest recipes and understanding most recent developments. You will explore C++ programming constructs by learning about language structures, functions, and classes, which will help you identify the execution flow through code. You will also understand the importance of the C++ standard library as well as memory allocation for writing better and faster programs. Modern C++: Efficient and Scalable Application Development deals with the challenges faced with advanced C++ programming. You will work through advanced topics such as multithreading, networking, concurrency, lambda expressions, and many more recipes. By the end of this Learning Path, you will have all the skills to become a master C++ programmer. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Beginning C++ Programming by Richard Grimes • Modern C++ Programming Cookbook by Marius Bancila • The Modern C++ Challenge by Marius Bancila
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
12
Math Problems
13
Language Features
14
Strings and Regular Expressions
15
Streams and Filesystems
16
Date and Time
17
Algorithms and Data Structures
Index

Generating pseudo-random numbers


Generating random numbers is necessary for a large variety of applications, from games to cryptography, from sampling to forecasting. However, the term random numbers is not actually correct, as the generation of numbers through mathematical formulas is deterministic and does not produce true random numbers, but numbers that look random and are called pseudo-random. True randomness can only be achieved through hardware devices, based on physical processes, and even that can be challenged, as one may consider even the universe to be actually deterministic. Modern C++ provides support for generating pseudo-random numbers through a pseudo-random number library containing number generators and distributions. Theoretically, it can also produce true random numbers, but in practice, those could actually be only pseudo-random.

Getting ready

In this recipe, we discuss the standard support for generating pseudo-random numbers. Understanding the difference between random...