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

Owning objects and views

C++ has not been limited to owning pointers since its creation: any object can own resources, and we already mentioned that the simplest way to express exclusive ownership is to create a local variable on the stack. Of course, any of such objects can also be owned by a pointer (unique or shared) and when non-owning access is desired, these objects are commonly accessed through raw pointers or references. However, in C++17 and C++20 a different pattern has emerged, and it is worth exploring.

Resource-owning objects

Every C++ programmer is familiar with resource-owning objects; perhaps the most common one is std::string – an object that owns a character string. Of course, it also has a lot of specialized member functions for operating on strings, but from the point of view of memory ownership, std::string is essentially an owning char* pointer. Similarly, std::vector is an owning object for an array of objects of arbitrary type.

The most common...