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C++ Training

C++ Course Outline

Copyright © 2018 Grant Jenks. All Rights Reserved.

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Day 1

C++ is Awesome Presentation

  • Success factors context
  • History of the language
  • Modern features

Grand Tour of Modern C++11

  • Uniform initialization syntax and automatic type deduction
  • Defaulted, delegated, and deleted special member functions
  • Move semantics, rvalue references, and value categories
  • Convenient syntax: lambda functions and range-based for-loops
  • Type-safety: typed-nullptr, typed-enums, and variadic templates
  • Compile-time features: “constexpr” keyword and static_assert
  • STL features: multi-threading, smart pointers, chrono, regex

Day 2

Object-Oriented Programming

  • Characterizing “has a” and “is a” relationships
  • Inheritance, “virtual” keyword, and vtable implementation
  • Special member functions and the rule of 3/5/0
  • Constructors and member initializer lists
  • Base and derived class construction and destruction
  • Access modifiers – public, protected, and private

Resource-Safe C++ Basics

  • Exceptions: “try/catch”, “throw”, “noexcept”, std::exception hierarchy
  • RAII – Resource Acquisition Is Initialization
  • Error codes – benefits and drawbacks
  • Swap operation, “friend” keyword, and copy-and-swap idiom
  • Exceptions thrown from constructors and destructors

Operator Overloading

  • Commonly overloaded operators
  • Operator overloading best practices
  • Prefix vs. postfix increment operators
  • Member functions vs non-member functions
  • Type conversions and the “explicit” keyword

Day 3

Resource-Safe C++ in Practice

  • Exception-safety levels, guarantees, and neutrality
  • Member initialization order
  • Allocations, copies, and exceptions
  • Delegating constructors
  • Move-and-swap idiom

Smart Pointers

  • Value Categories – lvalue, rvalue, prvalue, xvalue, glvalue
  • Value categories and argument passing overloads
  • Move semantics, copies, and copy elision optimization
  • Argument-dependent name lookup (Koenig Lookup)
  • Function call argument evaluation order
  • Unique-pointer and shared-pointer semantics

Day 4

Initialization

  • Braces initialization, type narrowing, and the “most vexing parse”
  • Benefits and drawbacks of the “auto” and “decltype” keywords
  • User defined literals

STL Containers

  • Basics: array, vector, deque, forward_list, and list
  • Container adaptors: stack, queue, and priority_queue
  • Trees and hashes: set and map with multi-* and unordered_* variants
  • Iterators: traversal, insertion, output, and utilities

STL Algorithms

  • Basics: fill, for_each, copy, transform, rotate, accumulate, iota
  • Variations: policy functors, *_if variants, *_n variants
  • Range-based for-loop semantics
  • Utilities: bind, operators, hash, pair, tuple

Performance

  • Challenge and science of benchmarking
  • Understanding profiles and flame graphs
  • Timing language features: new/delete, exceptions, smart pointers, etc.
  • Timing STL features: vector vs. list, map vs. unordered_map, etc.