C++ Best Practices and Design Patterns Training

C++ Best Practices and Design Patterns Course Outline

• 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

• Design Patterns

  Introducing design patterns

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

  Putting patterns to work

  • Synchronizing multiple views with the Observer pattern
  • Handling recursive data structures with the Composite pattern
  • Minimizing code duplication with the Template Method pattern
  • Managing object creation with the Singleton pattern
  • Decoupling object creation with Factory pattern
  • Separating algorithms from data structures with the Visitor 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
  • Using function object and lambda expressions

  The iostream library

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

  The thread library

  • Creating and managing threads
  • Handling exclusive access to shared data

• Storage Management

  Managing memory

  • Recognizing and reducing memory overhead
  • Preventing memory leaks with the unique_ptr and shared_ptr templates
  • Overloading operator new and operator delete
  • Writing and using smart pointers

  File storage

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

• Writing Better C++

  Increasing reusability

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

  Improving robustness and efficiency

  • Strengthening encapsulation by consistent and appropriate use of const
  • Sharing state between lightweight objects
  • Understanding r-value references and move semantics

• 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