Book Image

Hands-On System Programming with C++

By : Dr. Rian Quinn
Book Image

Hands-On System Programming with C++

By: Dr. Rian Quinn

Overview of this book

C++ is a general-purpose programming language with a bias toward system programming as it provides ready access to hardware-level resources, efficient compilation, and a versatile approach to higher-level abstractions. This book will help you understand the benefits of system programming with C++17. You will gain a firm understanding of various C, C++, and POSIX standards, as well as their respective system types for both C++ and POSIX. After a brief refresher on C++, Resource Acquisition Is Initialization (RAII), and the new C++ Guideline Support Library (GSL), you will learn to program Linux and Unix systems along with process management. As you progress through the chapters, you will become acquainted with C++'s support for IO. You will then study various memory management methods, including a chapter on allocators and how they benefit system programming. You will also explore how to program file input and output and learn about POSIX sockets. This book will help you get to grips with safely setting up a UDP and TCP server/client. Finally, you will be guided through Unix time interfaces, multithreading, and error handling with C++ exceptions. By the end of this book, you will be comfortable with using C++ to program high-quality systems.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Learning about the C++ standard

The C++ programming language (originally called C with Classes) was designed specifically to provide higher-level facilities than C, including better type safety and object-oriented programming, with system programming in mind. Specifically, C++ aims to provide the performance and efficiency of C programs, while still providing the features of higher-level languages.

Today, C++ is one of the most popular programming languages in the world, used in everything from avionics to banking.

Like the C standard, the C++ standard is huge and is managed by the ISO. We assume the reader has some basic knowledge of the C++ standard and how to write C code: http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2017/n4713.pdf.

For these reasons, the goal of this section is to discuss some topics that are discussed in lesser detail in other books, as well as portions...