| Thinking in C++ Vol 2 - Practical Programming |
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Our goals in this book are to:
1. Present the material a simple step at a time, so the reader can
easily digest each concept before moving on.
2. Teach practical programming techniques that you can use on a
day-to-day basis.
3. Give you what we think is important for you to understand about
the language, rather than everything we know. We believe there is an
information importance hierarchy, and there are some facts that 95% of
programmers will never need to know, but that would just confuse people and add
to their perception of the complexity of the language. To take an example from
C, if you memorize the operator precedence table (we never did) you can write
clever code. But if you must think about it, it will confuse the
reader/maintainer of that code. So forget about precedence and use parentheses
when things aren t clear. This same attitude will be taken with some
information in the C++ language, which is more important for compiler writers
than for programmers.
4. Keep each section focused enough so the lecture time and the time
between exercise periods is small. Not only does this keep the audience minds
more active and involved during a hands-on seminar, but it gives the reader a
greater sense of accomplishment.
5. We have endeavored not to use any particular vendor s version of
C++. We have tested the code on all the implementations we could (described
later in this introduction), and when one implementation absolutely refused to
work because it doesn t conform to the C++ Standard, we ve flagged that fact in
the example (you ll see the flags in the source code) to exclude it from the
build process.
6. Automate the compiling and testing of the code in the book. We
have discovered that code that isn t compiled and tested is probably broken, so
in this volume we ve instrumented the examples with test code. In addition, the
code that you can download from https://www.MindView.net has been extracted
directly from the text of the book using programs that automatically create
makefiles to compile and run the tests. This way we know that the code in the
book is correct.
| Thinking in C++ Vol 2 - Practical Programming |
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