Book Image

Hands-On Design Patterns with C++ (Second Edition) - Second Edition

By : Fedor G. Pikus
5 (1)
Book Image

Hands-On Design Patterns with C++ (Second Edition) - Second Edition

5 (1)
By: Fedor G. Pikus

Overview of this book

C++ is a general-purpose programming language designed for efficiency, performance, and flexibility. Design patterns are commonly accepted solutions to well-recognized design problems. In essence, they are a library of reusable components, only for software architecture, and not for a concrete implementation. This book helps you focus on the design patterns that naturally adapt to your needs, and on the patterns that uniquely benefit from the features of C++. Armed with the knowledge of these patterns, you’ll spend less time searching for solutions to common problems and tackle challenges with the solutions developed from experience. You’ll also explore that design patterns are a concise and efficient way to communicate, as patterns are a familiar and recognizable solution to a specific problem and can convey a considerable amount of information with a single line of code. By the end of this book, you’ll have a deep understanding of how to use design patterns to write maintainable, robust, and reusable software.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting Started with C++ Features and Concepts
5
Part 2: Common C++ Idioms
10
Part 3: C++ Design Patterns
18
Part 4: Advanced C++ Design Patterns

Adapter versus policy

The adapter and the policy (or strategy) patterns are some of the more general patterns, and C++ adds generic programming capabilities to these patterns. This tends to extend their usability and sometimes blurs the lines between the patterns. The patterns themselves are defined very distinctly - policies provide custom implementations while adapters change the interface and add functionality to the existing interface (the latter is a decorator aspect, but, as we have seen, most decorators are implemented as adapters). We also saw in the last chapter that C++ broadens the capabilities of policy-based design; in particular, policies in C++ can add or remove parts of the interface as well as control the implementation. So, while patterns are different, there is significant overlap in the types of problems they can be used for. It is instructive to compare the two approaches when a problem is, broadly speaking, amenable to both. For this exercise, we will consider...