The D programming language's popularity is growing rapidly. With its seamless blending of high-level convenience with low-level power and efficiency, D is suitable for tackling almost any programming task productively. This book comes out of years of experience of using D in the real world and closely following the language and libraries' development. It will also help you get up to speed with this exciting language and burgeoning ecosystem.
Chapter 1, Core Tasks, will get you started with D and cover the tasks you can perform with D's core language features that differ from other popular programming languages.
Chapter 2, Phobos – The Standard Library, introduces you to the standard D library to perform common tasks, including generating random numbers, writing a network client and server, and performing type conversions.
Chapter 3, Ranges, covers the range concept, which is central to D algorithms. Ranges allow you to write and consume generators, views on various collections, and perform generic transformations of data.
Chapter 4, Integration, explores integrating D with the outside world, including creating Windows-based applications, using C libraries, and extending C++ applications with D.
Chapter 5, Resource Management, discusses how to manage memory and other resources in D, including tips on why, when, and how to use the garbage collector effectively.
Chapter 6, Wrapped Types, dives into the world of user-defined types, showing you how to extend and restrict types via cheap wrapper abstractions.
Chapter 7, Correctness Checking, shows how to use D's bug-hunting features such as testing, assertions, and documentation, and the correct way to do conditional compilation.
Chapter 8, Reflection, teaches you about the rich introspection capabilities D provides, including tips learned through years of experience which stretch the limits of the language.
Chapter 9, Code Generation, demonstrates several techniques to automate the creation of new code to write efficient, generic, and specialized code, including a primer on creating your own mini languages inside D.
Chapter 10, Multitasking, introduces you to the options D offers for concurrency and parallelism.
Chapter 11, D for Kernel Coding, will get you started with writing bare metal code in D, stripping out the runtime library to say hello directly through the PC's video hardware and then handling interrupts sent back by the keyboard with D's low-level features.
Chapter 12, Web and GUI Programming, showcases some of the libraries I've written over the years that show how to make a dynamic website and desktop graphics windows while discussing my practical experience from writing these libraries, which will give you a leg up when you write your own code.
Appendix, Addendum, briefly shows how to use D on ARM processors, including systems without an operating system, and other small topics that didn't fit elsewhere in the book.
You need to have a Windows or Mac PC that is capable of running the DMD compiler, which is available at http://dlang.org/.
This book is for programmers who want to continue their professional development by learning more about D. Whether you are looking at D for the first time or have used it before and want to learn more, this book has something to offer you.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Add a struct to test.d, which uses alias this to activate subtyping."
A block of code is set as follows:
import project.foo;; // disambiguate with project.foo import bar; // you can disambiguate calls with the name bar
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
coffimplib myfile.lib
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Running the program will print Hello, world! in green text on a red background."
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