D. Ryan Stephens - C++ Cookbook

• C++ inheritance and virtual functions

• The standard library

• Components of the Standard Template Library (containers, iterators, and algorithms)

• Templates

In crafting our code examples, we strove for simplicity, portability, and performance. The design for each solution followed a similar path: use standard C++ (language or library) if possible; if not, use a de facto standard as the replacement. For example, many of the recipes that deal with strings use the standard string class, and most of the mathematical and scientific recipes use standard numeric types, containers, and templates. The standard library has strong support for these areas, so standard facilities are a perfect fit. By comparison, however, C++ has little or no standardized support for multithreading or XML parsing. Thus, we used the multithreading support provided in the Boost Threads library and the XML parsing functionality provided by the Xerces parser.

Often, there are many ways to do the same thing in C++, which gives developers flexibility, but also invites some controversy. Most of the examples illustrate the best general solution we could come up with, but that doesnt mean that its the best solution ever. If there are alternative solutions that are better in some ways and not as good in others (maybe the solution that uses the standard library is awkward or unintuitive; in this case, we may provide an alternative that uses Boost), we present the alternative anyway to give you some insight into the various solutions that are available.

Lots of the examples use templates. If you dont have much experience writing templates, you should get some soon. There is very little introductory material on templates in this book, except for two recipes in . Most of the interesting developments in C++ are in the areas of template metaprogramming and policy-based design.

At the time of this writing, there is a lot of movement in the C++ community. The first technical report (called TR1) is more or less stable. It is a standardized list of features that will be eventually added to the next version of the C++ standard. It is not required that standard library implementations support it, but many vendors have already begun implementing TR1 and you can expect to see it appearing in shipped compilers soon. Many of the libraries in TR1 first appeared in the Boost project.

We use libraries from Boost a lot. Boost is a set of open source, peer-reviewed, portable libraries that fill in many of the gaps in the standard library. The current version as of this writing is 1.32, and 1.33 should be out any time now. We provide many pointers to specific Boost libraries in the examples. For more information on Boost in general, check out the project web site at www.boost.org.