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

The previous chapter provided detailed information on the construction of objects along with information on the different keywords that C++ provides to define these objects. We learned that we must be careful when creating our own types and ensure that they are constructed and destroyed appropriately. This chapter delves further into object-oriented programming, explaining important principles for designing classes that should be kept in mind to most efficiently utilize the object-oriented programming (OOP) paradigm.

In this chapter, we will take things a step further and introduce best practices for defining our own types. Through this knowledge, we can write classes that insulate themselves against unintended use, and, using public and private functions and member variables, we can make it clear how we do intend a class to be used.

Encapsulation allows us to hide data we do not want a user to access directly, while abstraction provides the user of a class with...