C++ is what might be called an industrial-strength language. It combines the power and efficiency of C with object-oriented features such as classes, inheritance, and polymorphism. C++ is particularly well-suited to writing large, complex software systems that involve teams of programmers. It is also an ideal language for developing libraries that can be easily installed and modified in application programs. C++ is what we call a strongly typed language, meaning that the compiler helps to prevent the use of incorrect expressions involving incompatible data types. Also, function calls across module boundaries are checked against function prototypes to make sure the number and types of the passed arguments agree with the function parameters.
C++ is called a hybrid language because it allows you to mix procedural code and object-oriented code in the same program. This has helped win it acceptance in the C programming community.
Objects represent the real-world entities that play an active part in an application. Designers try to model object-oriented programs around these real-world entities. An object encapsulates (contains) both attributes and operations (also called behaviors). The attributes represent the state of the object, the values of which change at run time. The operations represent the way the object communicates with other objects. A class object is an instance of some class.
A class is a description of the common characteristics shared by all objects of the same type. It is in fact a user-defined data type, with all the rights and privileges (from a language point of view) given to standard data types such as int, float, or double. As we learnto use the tools of C++, we will find that the classes we define can incorporate the same types of operators and implicit conversions available to standard data types.
1 C++ Basics
2 Introducing Classes
3 Functions
4 Class Features
5 Designing Classes
6 Derived Classes
7 Pointers and Dynamic Memory Allocation
8 Polymorphism and Exceptions
9 Operator Overloading
10 Templates
11 Object-Oriented Containers
References
Index