C++ Primer Plus (6th Edition)

Book Preface

Learning C++ is an adventure of discovery, particularly because the language accommodates several programming paradigms, including object-oriented programming, generic programming, and the traditional procedural programming.The fifth edition of this book described the language as set forth in the ISO C++ standards, informally known as C++99 and C++03, or, sometimes as C++99/03. (The 2003 version was largely a technical correction to the 1999 standard and didn’t add any new features.) Since then, C++ continues to evolve.As this book is written, the international C++ Standards Committee has just approved a new version of the standard.This standard had the informal name of C++0x while in development, and now it will be known as C++11. Most contemporary compilers support C++99/03 quite well, and most of the examples in this book comply with that standard. But many features of the new standard already have appeared in some implementations, and this edition of C++ Primer Plus explores these new features.

C++ Primer Plus discusses the basic C language and presents C++ features, making this book self-contained. It presents C++ fundamentals and illustrates them with short, to-the-point programs that are easy to copy and experiment with.You learn about input/output (I/O), how to make programs perform repetitive tasks and make choices, the many ways to handle data, and how to use functions.You learn about the many features C++ has added to C, including the following:

– Classes and objects
– Inheritance
– Polymorphism, virtual functions, and runtime type identification (RTTI)
– Function overloading
– Reference variables
– Generic, or type-independent, programming, as provided by templates and the Standard Template Library (STL)
– The exception mechanism for handling error conditions
– Namespaces for managing names of functions, classes, and variables

Contents at a Glance
Introduction 1
1 Getting Started with C++ 9
2 Setting Out to C++ 27
3 Dealing with Data 65
4 Compound Types 115
5 Loops and Relational Expressions 195
6 Branching Statements and Logical Operators 253
7 Functions: C++’s Programming Modules 305
8 Adventures in Functions 379
9 Memory Models and Namespaces 447
10 Objects and Classes 505
11 Working with Classes 563
12 Classes and Dynamic Memory Allocation 627
13 Class Inheritance 707
14 Reusing Code in C++ 785
15 Friends, Exceptions, and More 877
16 The string Class and the Standard
Template Library 951
17 Input, Output, and Files 1061
18 Visiting with the New C++ Standard 1153