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 chapter, we looked at control flow, learning a number of ways in which we can manipulate the flow of execution through our applications. In this chapter, we're going to take a closer look at how we represent that information using different data types; specifically, the built-in data types provided by C++.

We've used a few of them previously; for example, we know that integers represent numbers, and strings represent words and characters, but let's go into more detail. The core set of types provided by C++ are the building blocks for any and all user-defined types that we'll create later down the line, so a good understanding of what we have available to us is very important. We'll start by looking at the data they store, how they are assigned, and their sizes. We can then move onto looking at type modifiers—keywords that allow us to modify their properties. A chart will be provided for future reference.

Next,...