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)

Templated functions

When you write library code, you often have to write several functions that differ only between the types that are passed to the function; the routine action is the same, it's just the types that have changed. C++ provides templates to allow you to write more generic code; you write the routine using a generic type and at compile time the compiler will generate a function with the appropriate types. The templated function is marked as such using the template keyword and a list of parameters in angle brackets (<>) that give placeholders for the types that will be used. It is important to understand that these template parameters are types and refer to the types of the parameters (and return a value of the function) that will be replaced with the actual types used by calling the functions. They are not parameters of the function, and you do not (normally...