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

The RAII idiom

We have seen in the previous section how ad hoc attempts to manage resources become unreliable, then error-prone, and eventually fail. What we need is to make sure that resource acquisition is always paired up with resource release, and that these two actions happen before and after the section of code that uses the resource respectively. In C++, this kind of bracketing of a code sequence by a pair of actions is known as the Execute Around design pattern.

Tip

For more information, see the article C++ Patterns – Executing Around Sequences by Kevlin Henney, available at http://www.two-sdg.demon.co.uk/curbralan/papers/europlop/ExecutingAroundSequences.pdf.

When specifically applied to resource management, this pattern is much more widely known as Resource Acquisition is Initialization (RAII).

RAII in a nutshell

The basic idea behind RAII is very simple—there is one kind of function in C++ that is guaranteed to be called automatically, and that...