Introduction to C++ Programming

The course contains many simple programming exercises to reinforce the theory, and to stimulate understanding. Coverage of make and makefiles, and the various GNU C++ compiler options will be included at appropriate points in the course.

• Creating and manipulating objects and displaying their attributes
• Experimenting with public and private inheritance
• Experimenting with virtual classes
• Implementing copy constructors
• Exploring deep vs. shallow copying techniques
• Understanding reference counting and the copy on modify idiom
• Implement an instance of the handle-body idiom
• Explore some uses of the Singleton pattern
• Build a simple graphical user interface
• Demonstrate the Observer pattern in action
• Implement a templatised singly linked list
• Writing and reading a table of records to and from a file
• Saving a collection of objects and retrieveing a collection of objects in binary format to and from a file
• Appreciate some of the functionality provided by the Standard Template Library

• Objects as things having attributes and methods
• The message passing model of object interaction
• Objects as instances of some class
• Relationships between objects
• Hierarchies of object classes
• UML notation for describing classes and class hierarchies
• UML for describing relationships between objects
• Building more complex objects - composition and aggregation

• Structured programming - modularity and information hiding
• Simulation and modeling of complex communications, manufacturing and logistics systems
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) - problem solving, planning, searching problems
• Graphical User Interfaces - window managers, widgets and controls

• Early C++ (translation of C++ code to C code)
• C++ is not a pure object oriented language - C++ as an extension of C
• C++ as an evolving language and the development of the ANSI C++ standard

• Base data types (numeric char, integer and floating point types)
• Pointers and arrays
• Function prototypes and function pointers
• Structs, pointers to structs and dynamic data structures
• Typedefs, enums and macro
• I/O in C
• Replacing C based I/O (printf, scanf and all that) with C++ based I/O
• Functions in C++
• Function overloading
• Name mangling / decorating
• Mixing C and C++ code modules (use of extern C)
• Operators and operator overloading in C++

• Member variables and member functions (private, public, protected)
• Constructors and destructors
• Default constructors and default destructors
• Initialiser lists
• Derived classes
• Arrays of classes

• Copy constructors
• Deep vs. shallow copying
• Virtual functions and virtual classes (compile time vs. run time binding)
• Introduction to implementing dynamic data structures using classes (using linked lists and binary trees as examples)
• Friend classes and friend functions
• Static member variables and static member functions
• An introduction to templates and to the Standard Template Library

• The C++ iostream classes
• Overloading the insertion and extraction operators for use with user defined classes
• Reading and writing to files
• Basics of object and data persistence