C++ Best Practices and Design Patterns:
Hands-On

Introduction to Object-Oriented Development

OO fundamentals

• Inheritance, encapsulation and polymorphism
• Classes, objects and attributes
• Associations, messages and methods
• Interfaces and abstract classes

Using the Unified Modeling Language

• Characteristics of UML
• Mapping UML into C++

Exploiting development tools

• Automating the life cycle with CASE tools
• Code generation and reverse engineering
• Debuggers and browsers

Idioms and Design Patterns

C++ idioms

• Handle/body and related idioms
• Functors: functions coded as objects

Introducing design patterns

• The motivation for design patterns
• Categories of patterns: creational, behavioural and structural
• Describing design patterns

Putting patterns to work

• Synchronising multiple views with the Observer pattern
• Handling recursive data structures with the Composite pattern
• Minimising code duplication with the Template Method pattern
• Managing object creation with the Singleton pattern

Using the ISO Standard C++ Library

The Standard Template Library (STL)

• The structure of the STL
• Declaring and populating sequence and associative containers
• Accessing containers using iterators
• Applying standard and user-supplied algorithms
• Customising behaviour using function objects and adapters
• Extending the STL

The new iostream library

• Basic input/output
• Formatting textual output
• Handling errors in input data
• Wide character types and internationalisation

Storage Management

Managing memory

• Recognising and reducing memory overhead
• Preventing memory leaks with the auto_ptr template
• Overloading operator new and operator delete
• Writing and using smart pointers

File storage

• Preparing classes for simple file storage and retrieval
• Storing and retrieving objects using Boost serialisation libraries

Writing Better C++

Increasing reusability

• Avoiding name clashes using namespaces
• Using templates for type-safe reusability

Improving robustness

• Strengthening encapsulation by consistent and appropriate use of const
• Implementing a coherent exception strategy
• Decoupling algorithms from data structures with the Visitor pattern

Enhancing efficiency

• Saving processing and memory with reference counting
• Sharing state between lightweight objects

Avoiding C++ Traps and Pitfalls

Things you need to do—and why

• Virtual destructors
• Assignment operators and copy constructors

Features to handle with care

• Friends vs. public members
• Runtime-type information vs. virtual member functions
• Multiple and virtual inheritance