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)

Containers

Containers in the context of the C++ standard library are a set of common data structures. These structures take the form of lists, stacks, arrays, and more. Containers can store data and objects and can be categorized into a few different types. These types, and the container classes associated with them, are sequential containers—string, vector, list, deque, and array.

A String Is a Container

In C++, strings are a class type, meaning that they are an object that has member variables and functions to act upon them; they are a container in the standard library just like any other. Underneath the string class interface is a C-style character array, and the string class provides the functionality to access a single byte in this sequence. The benefit of using strings over standard character arrays is that a lot of the algorithms that can be used in other containers, such as sorting and searching, can also be applied to strings. If we were to use a standard C-style...