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

Templates in C++

One of the greatest strengths of C++ is its support for generic programming. In generic programming, the algorithms and data structures are written in terms of generic types that will be specified later. This allows the programmer to implement a function or a class once, and later, instantiate it for many different types. Templates are a C++ feature that allows classes and functions to be defined on generic types. C++ supports three kinds of templates—function, class, and variable templates.

Function templates

Function templates are generic functions—unlike regular functions, a template function does not declare its argument types. Instead, the types are template parameters:

// Example 01
template <typename T>
T increment(T x) { return x + 1; }

This template function can be used to increment a value of any type by one, for which adding one is a valid operation:

increment(5);    // T is int, returns 6
increment...