Book Image

Modern C++ Programming Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Marius Bancila
5 (1)
Book Image

Modern C++ Programming Cookbook - Second Edition

5 (1)
By: Marius Bancila

Overview of this book

C++ has come a long way to be one of the most widely used general-purpose languages that is fast, efficient, and high-performance at its core. The updated second edition of Modern C++ Programming Cookbook addresses the latest features of C++20, such as modules, concepts, coroutines, and the many additions to the standard library, including ranges and text formatting. The book is organized in the form of practical recipes covering a wide range of problems faced by modern developers. The book also delves into the details of all the core concepts in modern C++ programming, such as functions and classes, iterators and algorithms, streams and the file system, threading and concurrency, smart pointers and move semantics, and many others. It goes into the performance aspects of programming in depth, teaching developers how to write fast and lean code with the help of best practices. Furthermore, the book explores useful patterns and delves into the implementation of many idioms, including pimpl, named parameter, and attorney-client, teaching techniques such as avoiding repetition with the factory pattern. There is also a chapter dedicated to unit testing, where you are introduced to three of the most widely used libraries for C++: Boost.Test, Google Test, and Catch2. By the end of the book, you will be able to effectively leverage the features and techniques of C++11/14/17/20 programming to enhance the performance, scalability, and efficiency of your applications.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
13
Bibliography
14
Other Books You May Enjoy
15
Index

Preface

C++ is one of the most popular and most widely used programming languages, and it has been like that for three decades. Designed with a focus on performance, efficiency, and flexibility, C++ combines paradigms such as object-oriented, imperative, generic, and functional programming. C++ is standardized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and has undergone massive changes over the last decade. With the standardization of C++11, the language has entered into a new age, which has been widely referred to as modern C++. Type inference, move semantics, lambda expressions, smart pointers, uniform initialization, variadic templates, and many other recent features have changed the way we write code in C++ to the point that it almost looks like a new programming language. This change is being further advanced with the release of the C++20 standard that is supposed to happen during 2020. The new standard includes many new changes to the language, such as modules, concepts, and coroutines, as well as to the standard library, such as ranges, text formatting, and calendars.

This book addresses many of the new features included in C++11, C++14, C++17, and the forthcoming C++20. This book is organized in recipes, each covering one particular language or library feature, or a common problem that developers face and its typical solution using modern C++. Through more than 130 recipes, you will learn to master both core language features and the standard libraries, including those for strings, containers, algorithms, iterators, streams, regular expressions, threads, filesystem, atomic operations, utilities, and ranges.

This second edition of the book took several months to write, and during this time the work on the C++20 standard has been completed. However, at the time of writing this preface, the standard is yet to be approved and will be published later this year.

More than 30 new or updated recipes in this book cover C++20 features, including modules, concepts, coroutines, ranges, threads and synchronization mechanisms, text formatting, calendars and time zones, immediate functions, the three-way comparison operator, and the new span class.

All the recipes in the book contain code samples that show how to use a feature or how to solve a problem. These code samples have been written using Visual Studio 2019, but have been also compiled using Clang and GCC. Since the support for various language and library features has been gradually added to all these compilers, it is recommended that you use the latest version to ensure that all of them are supported. At the time of writing this preface, the latest versions are GCC 10.1, Clang 12.0 (in progress), and VC++ 2019 version 14.27 (from Visual Studio 2019 version 16.7). Although all these compilers are C++17 complete, the support for C++20 varies from compiler to compiler. Please refer to https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/compiler_support to check your compiler's support for C++20 features.