Designing and Implementing Effective C++ Classes Training

This seminar, based on Scott's award-winning Effective C++, covers the most important material that every professional C++ developer needs to know to be truly effective with the language.

Participants will gain:

• Mastery of the crucial member functions applicable to every class.
• Understanding of the resource acquisition is initialization (RAII) technique for managing resources.
• Insights into the differences among member functions, non-member functions, virtual functions, and non-virtual functions.
• Knowledge of the rules of thumb applied by expert programmers as they design and implement software systems in C++.

Format: Lecture and question/answer. There are no hands-on exercises, but participants are welcome to use their computers to experiment with the course material as it is presented.

• Fundamental Concepts and Functions:
  • Use objects to manage resources
    • Resource acquisition is initialization (RAII)
    • std::auto_ptr
    • std::tr1::shared_ptr
  • TR1 and Boost
  • Think carefully about copying behavior in resource-managing classes
  • Know what functions C++ silently writes and calls
  • Explicitly disallow use of implicitly generated member functions you don't want:
    • Declaring functions private
    • Inheriting from a base class declaring them private
  • Handle copying in classes with pointers:
    • Handling the functions yourself
    • Using resource-managing objects
  • Make destructors virtual in base classes
    • Virtual functions and object layout
  • Strive for exception-safe code
    • Definition of "exception-safe"
    • The basic, strong, and nothrow guarantees
      • Exception specifications and exception-safety guarantees
    • Approaches to the strong guarantee
      • Careful statement ordering
      • Copy and swap
    • Dependencies among exception-safety guarantees
• Overloading Operators:
  • Handle assignment to self in operator=:
    • The problem of aliasing
    • Checking for assignment to self
    • Using resource-managing objects
    • Self-assignment and exception-safety
      • Copy and swap again
  • Assign to all data members in operator=:
    • Partial assignments
    • The problem of inheritance
      • The copy construction analogue
• Inheritance and Object-Oriented Design:
  • Make sure public inheritance models "isa"
    • Inheritance and intuition
    • Runtime vs. compile-time error detection
    • Inheritance and substitutability
  • Differentiate between inheritance of interface and inheritance of implementation:
    • The meaning of pure virtual functions
    • The meaning of "impure" virtual functions
    • The meaning of nonvirtual functions
      • Never redefine an inherited nonvirtual function
  • Model "has-a" or "is-implemented-in-terms-of" through containment
• Sources for Additional Information

Upcoming Dates & Locations