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

Now that we've looked at some of the built-in data types provided by C++, let's take a look at a couple of containers—objects that allow us to store multiple elements together. They come in many shapes and sizes depending on what data you're storing and how you wish to do so. For this early chapter, we're going to be focusing on two fundamental containers—arrays and vectors. Not all languages provide these types; Python, for example, has neither but provides lists instead. With C++, however, we're spoiled for choice. The standard library contains a myriad of collections to suit our needs, but these two are the ones we'll be focusing on in this chapter.

Arrays

Arrays are containers of objects, so instead of storing a single value in a variable, we can store many of them. These all sit next to one another in memory, so we access them through a single variable and an index. When we declare an array, we need to know its...