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In Volume 1 of this book, you learned the fundamentals of C and C++. In this volume, we look at more advanced features, with an eye towards developing techniques and ideas that produce robust C++ programs.
We assume you are familiar with the material presented in Volume 1.
Our goals in this book are to:
1. Present the material a simple step at a time, so the reader can easily digest each concept before moving on.
2. Teach “practical programming” techniques that you can use on a day-to-day basis.
3. Give you what we think is important for you to understand about the language, rather than everything we know. We believe there is an “information importance hierarchy,” and there are some facts that 95% of programmers will never need to know, but that would just confuse people and add to their perception of the complexity of the language. To take an example from C, if you memorize the operator precedence table (we never did) you can write clever code. But if you must think about it, it will confuse the reader/maintainer of that code. So forget about precedence and use parentheses when things aren’t clear. This same attitude will be taken with some information in the C++ language, which is more important for compiler writers than for programmers.
4. Keep each section focused enough so the lecture time—and the time between exercise periods—is small. Not only does this keep the audience’ minds more active and involved during a hands-on seminar, but it gives the reader a greater sense of accomplishment.
5. We have endeavored not to use any particular vendor’s version of C++. We have tested the code on all the implementations we could (described later in this introduction), and when one implementation absolutely refused to work because it doesn’t conform to the C++ Standard, we’ve flagged that fact in the example (you’ll see the flags in the source code) to exclude it from the build process.
6. Automate the compiling and testing of the code in the book. We have discovered that code that isn’t compiled and tested is probably broken, so in this volume we’ve instrumented the examples with test code. In addition, the code that you can download fromhttp://www.MindView.net has been extracted directly from the text of the book using programs that automatically create makefiles to compile and run the tests. This way we know that the code in the book is correct.
In Volume 1 of this book, you learned the fundamentals of C and C++. In this volume, we look at more advanced features, with an eye towards developing techniques and ideas that produce robust C++ programs.
We assume you are familiar with the material presented in Volume 1.
Our goals in this book are to:
1. Present the material a simple step at a time, so the reader can easily digest each concept before moving on.
2. Teach “practical programming” techniques that you can use on a day-to-day basis.
3. Give you what we think is important for you to understand about the language, rather than everything we know. We believe there is an “information importance hierarchy,” and there are some facts that 95% of programmers will never need to know, but that would just confuse people and add to their perception of the complexity of the language. To take an example from C, if you memorize the operator precedence table (we never did) you can write clever code. But if you must think about it, it will confuse the reader/maintainer of that code. So forget about precedence and use parentheses when things aren’t clear. This same attitude will be taken with some information in the C++ language, which is more important for compiler writers than for programmers.
4. Keep each section focused enough so the lecture time—and the time between exercise periods—is small. Not only does this keep the audience’ minds more active and involved during a hands-on seminar, but it gives the reader a greater sense of accomplishment.
5. We have endeavored not to use any particular vendor’s version of C++. We have tested the code on all the implementations we could (described later in this introduction), and when one implementation absolutely refused to work because it doesn’t conform to the C++ Standard, we’ve flagged that fact in the example (you’ll see the flags in the source code) to exclude it from the build process.
6. Automate the compiling and testing of the code in the book. We have discovered that code that isn’t compiled and tested is probably broken, so in this volume we’ve instrumented the examples with test code. In addition, the code that you can download fromhttp://www.MindView.net has been extracted directly from the text of the book using programs that automatically create makefiles to compile and run the tests. This way we know that the code in the book is correct.
