Preface¶

There are many books available if you want to learn to program in C++. Does the C++ community really need yet another textbook? Apparently, I think the answer to that question is ‘yes’. Why?

Many excellent books are not appropriate for new language learners.
Many books, although excellent when written, have not been updated as the language has changed.

Significant language changes over the past 10 - 15 years justifies teaching new features and retiring old ones.
Many textbooks claiming to be ‘for C++’ are not much more than bare bones ports from other languages.

I take exception especially to this last group, as they claim to be C++ textbooks (and charge good money for it), however, they do not teach good idiomatic C++.

What do I mean by idiomatic C++?

In a nutshell, it means writing C++ code that follows the conventions of the language. Because C++ is a language that has undergone significant change since its inception, the C++ of 1998 is not the C++ of today. Perhaps a short story would help make the point more clearly:

English As She is Spoke

English As She Is Spoke is the common name of a 19th-century book written by Pedro Carolino.

A well-meaning person, to be sure; his goal was to create a Portuguese-to-English phrase book. One minor obstacle stood in Pedro’s way. He apparently spoke no English.

Undaunted, and armed with both an earlier Portuguese-French phrase book and a French-English dictionary, he embarked on his quest. He managed to create a book that fails utterly in teaching common English language phrases and idioms to anyone.

He did not intend to write a humor book, but that was the result.

Some of his classic translations from the section Idiotisms and Proverbs:

It want to beat the iron during it is hot.: Strike while the iron is hot
A horse baared don’t look him the tooth.: Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
The stone as roll not heap up not foam.: A rolling stone gathers no moss.

Nobody can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect.

—Mark Twain, 1883.[1]

While most C++ textbooks that have been marginally ported from other languages cannot hope to achieve the level of silliness reached by English As She Is Spoke, they still fail their readers. That is, they fail to teach C++ as C++. C++ is not C, Python, Java, Visual Basic, or anything else.

Good, idiomatic, C++ embodies the philosophy behind the C++ Core Guidelines[2], the first few of which are:

Ideas are expressed in code
Code in ISO Standard C++
Prefer compile-time checking to run-time checking

The goal of this book is to describe the current version of the language in a clear, concise style, supplemented by meaningful activities where appropriate. This book is expressly written for students in my course. Others may also find it useful. Users of this book are expected to be ‘beginning-intermediate’ programmers. You already have a semester of C or C++ completed and want to learn more.

The goal of this book is not to describe every language feature in C++. Why? Primarily because C++ is a large language, but also because you don’t need to know all of C++ to be an effective C++ programmer. If you really want to read about every language feature, then read cppreference.com.

Programming is not a “spectator sport”. It is something you do, something you participate in. It would make sense, then, that the book you use to learn programming should allow you to be active.

This book is meant to provide you with an interactive experience as you learn to program. You can read the text, watch videos, and write and execute code. In addition to simply executing code, there are visualizations which allow you to control the flow of execution, and watch variables as they are created and destroyed, in order to gain a better understanding of how the program works.

Different presentation techniques are used where appropriate. In other words, sometimes it might be best to read a description of some aspect of a programming language. On a different occasion, it might be best to execute a small example program. An important goal is to provide multiple options for covering the material in each section. Hopefully, you will find your understanding is enhanced because you are able to experience content in more than just one way.

Overview¶

Conceptually, the book is separated into 5 modules:

Introductory topics and review
Functions
Classes
Containers
Iterators and Trees

Note there are 2 sections before Chapter 1 intended as review and reference material.

The first 2 chapters cover the introductory topics:

Chapter 1: A review of basic topics from first semester C++. It also introduces how to compile software using CMake.
Chapter 2: An introduction to string and vector. Although vector gets more attention later in the book, these 2 types are the workhorses of a great deal of real-world C++ code and it’s important that you understand how to use them as early as possible.

The next 4 chapter explore functional programming in C++. While some simple structs are used, they are limited to basic POD’s that would generally be compatible with C.

Chapter 3: An introduction to functions, including function parameters, namespaces, and scopes. The keyword const is introduced and will be revisited over several chapters.
Chapter 4: An introduction to function overloads and function templates.
Chapter 5: Introduces pointers in general, the semantics for passing pointers as parameters to functions and the relationship between pointers and arrays. Modern C++ alternatives to raw pointers, sunch as unique_ptr are discussed.
Chapter 6: Introduces recursion, properties of recursive data structures, and introduces the Binary Tree ADT as a recursive data structure.

The next 3 chapters introduce the foundations of classes in C++. There is more to explore, but other topics related to classes are explored in the context of linear and associative data structures in the later chapters.

Chapter 7: Introduces classes, starting with how a C++ differs from a POD, or Plain Old Data in C, continuing with constructors, the importance of class interfaces and their implementation, using const in classes, and class enumerations.
Chapter 8: Expands on the material introduced in Ch 7, discussing more constructor overloads and operator overloads in classes.
Chapter 9: Focuses on class design concepts: composition and inheritance, multiple inheritance, the Unified Modeling Language (UML), and abstract base classes and interface classes.

The next 4 chapters explore more C++ class concepts using container classes as a springboard.

Chapter 10: Introduces class templates and begins introducing concepts the rest of the book builds on as it begins to explore the containers in the standard library and uses them as an opportunity to explore more advanced programming topics in general. Introduces container initialization lists and overloading the array index operator.
Chapter 11: Introduces copy and move semantics in C++. This chapter described copy constructors, then explores lvalues, rvalues, and rvalue references as a way to help explain move constructors and move assignment in C++. A brief introduction to using allocators, what they are for, and how to add them to a container.
Chapter 12: Introduces the Stack and Queue ADT’s and explains how they are implemented in C++ by adapting other containers. The Adapter design pattern is introduced.

The next few chapters explore linked data structures, both linear linked lists as well as linked tree data structures. They also describe their relation to algorithms. Both data structures and algorithms are needed to make useful programs.

Chapter 13: An exploration of linked lists. The primary motivation for discussing lists at this point is to use a list implementation as a reason for needing a class to have a supporting iterator class. The Iterator design pattern is introduced.
Chapter 14: Introduction to Trees, Binary Search Trees, sets and maps, and their application to searching and sorting.
Chapter 15: The STL algorithms, the basic model in the standard library connecting containers, iterators, and algorithms.

How to Contribute¶

Readers are encouraged to fork the source repository for this book on GitHub. Improve it and submit a pull request. The document GitHub-Forking is an excellent place to get started. Read this first.

Every pull request will be evaluated for inclusion and if not included, I will let you know why.

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