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This recent book was recommended by Herb Sutter at CppCon as a slim summary of all that C++ developers should be expected to know. It’s a good read, sprinkled liberally with example code to illustrate the techniques that make up modern C++. Having originally learn C++98, then spent a lot of time reading and trying our C++11 techniques, it’s interesting to see how the language looks when presented as a whole. Also, the book covers some C++14 additions. |
The points I particularly found interesting were:
- override – use this to mark virtual methods that are declared in the base class and have an implementation in the derived class (avoids declaring a new virtual method if the signature is wrong)
- explicit – single argument constructors should by default be marked as explicit to avoid unexpected implicit conversions, unless there’s a reason not to
- delete – when defining a base class, it’s good practice to ‘delete’ the default copy and move operations, given that the default implementations will not know how to handle derived class members
- regex – the book covers the standard library as well as the language. A welcome addition is std::regex, and the chapter in this book is an excellent introduction
- vector initialisation – uniform initialisation of vectors of a struct can still use initialiser lists, even if the struct members have different types e.g. string/int
- vector::at – this method returns the same value as operator[] (subscript), but performs bounds-checking, which doesn’t happen with operator[]
musingstudio 