Skip to main content

The C++ Standard Library: First 8 Sections

"At some point you have to stop introducing features and focus on the details. Otherwise, you never finish the work."
- Nicolai Josuttis

Key points throughout these sections:
- The C++ standard template library containers were designed with value semantics in mind. It is also not possible to store auto_ptrs in the containers due to the effect of the assignment operator. For reference semantics, the Boost pointer array should come in handy.
- The STL was also designed for performance rather than safety. There are some containers that throw exceptions, but not many. The burden of safety falls on the code that uses the STL.
- There are sequential containers and associative containers. Which container to use depends on the behavior of the software because containers behavior differently.
- Associative containers are represented internally by binary (Red-Black) trees.
- Container traversal must be done through iterators. Iterators have their own hierarchy of traits: input, output, forward, bidirectional, and random access. Understanding this hierarchy helps to understand which containers allow which types of iterators.
- All container algorithms take iterators as arguments, not the containers themselves.
- auto_ptr is a smart pointer that uses remove-on-copy during assignment, so assigning one auto_ptr to another will cause the pointer of the original to become invalid.
- typename versus class, but is important to cover here due to the templates used throughout the examples.

The remaining sections of this book cover algorithms, strings, additional containers, input/output streaming, and internationalization.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Software Design Principles - SOLID

The SOLID software design principles weren't called SOLID while I was in grad school, but the concepts were there in my Object Oriented Design course. They're worth mentioning here, primarily because I think once you start coding and become dangerous, it's one of the best ways to stay organized once you incorporate it into your daily coding routines, and it even changes your way of thinking for the better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOLID

AWS Development On A Budget

I was interested in hosting a small portfolio of applications in AWS, but I wanted to keep costs down.  I was willing to maybe host about $30-$40 a month of servers just to showcase some of the applications I was putting together.  Here's what I came up with. The basic capabilities here were: serve up about 6-10 applications that would require some level of web application hosting, database, file storage for larger items, and possibly queuing or email schedule jobs to run periodically to either scrape websites for new data or access APIs regularly These were the services in mind, all out of US-East-1 (Virginia): EC2 instances are pretty cheap.  You can run a t3a.nano for about $3.38 a month, or a t3a.micro for about double that for $6.77.  The more things can run on one of these instances, the better. Lambdas also don't really add up to much if they are scheduled jobs that do not consume large amounts of memory or computing.   The cost of a Lambda run as part of an API gateway

The TL;DR guide to git

While in the past I've held a pretty high opinion to using mercurial for version control, the majority of version control these days seems to done in git.  Here were the commands I found most useful to get productive with git right away. # Clone a repository from an origin, i.e. my github MaskingUtils repository git clone git@github.com:caelumvox/masking-utils.git # Add a file after it's been updated to stage it for commit, or add a new file git add filename # Commit the file to local repo git commit # Push the file to the origin so the rest of the team can see it git push # List all locally tracked branches git branch git branch --list # Get a list of all branches from the remote git branch -r # Create branch locally git branch develop # Push the branch to the origin repository to make sure it is tracked there git push --set-upstream origin develop # Pulls latest from all local branches tracked from origin; won't pull non-tracked branches git pull --all # Fetch the branch