Book Image

The C++ Workshop

By : Dale Green, Kurt Guntheroth, Shaun Ross Mitchell
Book Image

The C++ Workshop

By: Dale Green, Kurt Guntheroth, Shaun Ross Mitchell

Overview of this book

C++ is the backbone of many games, GUI-based applications, and operating systems. Learning C++ effectively is more than a matter of simply reading through theory, as the real challenge is understanding the fundamentals in depth and being able to use them in the real world. If you're looking to learn C++ programming efficiently, this Workshop is a comprehensive guide that covers all the core features of C++ and how to apply them. It will help you take the next big step toward writing efficient, reliable C++ programs. The C++ Workshop begins by explaining the basic structure of a C++ application, showing you how to write and run your first program to understand data types, operators, variables and the flow of control structures. You'll also see how to make smarter decisions when it comes to using storage space by declaring dynamic variables during program runtime. Moving ahead, you'll use object-oriented programming (OOP) techniques such as inheritance, polymorphism, and class hierarchies to make your code structure organized and efficient. Finally, you'll use the C++ standard library?s built-in functions and templates to speed up different programming tasks. By the end of this C++ book, you will have the knowledge and skills to confidently tackle your own ambitious projects and advance your career as a C++ developer.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Introduction

In the previous chapters of this course, we gave examples and offered exercises that did not utilize the C++ standard library. This can lead to a lot of code to often do very little. We stuck with raw arrays to help with understanding the fundamentals of the language; however, in this chapter, we will cover powerful features that will allow you to write complex behavior and functionality with a surprisingly small amount of code. C++ really becomes a joy to work with once you introduce the standard library into your projects and, handily, it is provided with any C++ compiler. We can do away with using raw arrays and writing our own queues and stacks and, instead, use pre-existing implementations, all with a common interface. To begin our journey, we will start by explaining what a container is and discussing their different types, before moving onto iterators and how they can make using these containers very natural and efficient.