C++ Best Practices and Design Patterns

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

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

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

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

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

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