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

Unconventional Containers


Up until now, we've seen containers that are used to store groups of elements of the same type.

The C++ standard defines some other types that can contain types but offer a different set of functionalities from the containers we saw previously.

These types are as follows:

  1. String

  2. Pair and tuple

  3. Optional

  4. Variant

Strings

A string is a data structure that's used to manipulate mutable sequences of contiguous characters. The C++ string classes are STL containers: they behave similarly to vectors, but provide additional functionalities that ease the programmer to perform common operations of sequences of characters easily.

There exist several string implementations in the standard library that are useful for different lengths of character sets, such as string, wstring, u16string, and u32string. All of them are a specialization of the basic_string base class and they all have the same interface.

The most commonly used type is std::string.

All types and functions for strings are de...