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)

Smart Pointers — Automated Ownership of Dynamic Variables

Previous exercises have demonstrated that an owned pointer can be wrapped in a class instance, which can delete the dynamic variables owned by the pointer when the class is destroyed. It is possible to take this design a step further and create a class consisting only of an owned pointer to a dynamic variable. Such an object is called a smart pointer.

The design of the smart pointers in the C++ standard library takes advantage of most of the advanced features of C++, including operator functions, template metaprogramming, move semantics, variadic templates, and perfect forwarding. The design is too advanced to cover in this brief course. However, the result is a thing that looks and acts much like a raw pointer but deletes its owned dynamic variable when the smart pointer is destroyed.

unique_ptr<>

unique_ptr<> is a smart pointer template class that owns a dynamic variable. In C++, a template class...