Book Excerpt: Applied C++: Practical Techniques for Building Better Software

This book finds its authors drawing on their extensive professional experience to teach largely by example. For instance, to illustrate software techniques useful for any application, they present a toolkit to solve the complex problem of digital image manipulation. By using a concrete, real-world problem, with exact feature, performance, and extensibility requirements described, they show—in a way that theoretical books cannot—how to leverage existing software components and the tools inherent to C++ to speed development, promote reuse, and deliver successful software products. This book includes:

• A C++ templates primer
• Workable coding guidelines and extensive coding examples
• Quick lists of need-to-know information about Exceptions, Assertions, and Standard Template Library components
• A technique for effectively using prototypes to move your design from an initial concept to a robust solution
• A technique for building debugging support into your software without a ton of overhead
• Thirteen specific techniques to improve the overall performance of your software

The accompanying CD-ROM contains all the source code for the book's examples—the image framework, the unit test framework, makefiles—as well as useful third-party software, such as Sysinteral's DebugView and evaluation versions of the Intel® Integrated Performance Primitives (Intel IPP) for optimizing your code and the Intel® C++ Compiler.

Chapter 3 discusses memory allocation and singleton objects, reference counting, templates, prototyping startegy, and image framework concepts.

Download the PDF of Chapter 3: "Design Techniques"

Reproduced from Applied C++: Techniques for Building Better Software by permission of Addison Wesley. ISBN 0321108949, copyright 2003. All rights reserved.