C++ In a Nutshell

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C++ In a Nutshell

A Desktop Quick Reference

By Ray Lischner

Publisher: O'Reilly Media

Released: May 2003

Pages: 810

To-the-point, authoritative, no-nonsense solutions have always been a trademark of O'Reilly books. The In a Nutshell books have earned a solid reputation in the field as the well-thumbed references that sit beside the knowledgeable developer's keyboard. C++ in a Nutshell lives up to the In a Nutshell promise. C++ in a Nutshell is a lean, focused reference that offers practical examples for the most important, most often used, aspects of C++.

C++ in a Nutshell packs an enormous amount of information on C++ (and the many libraries used with it) in an indispensable quick reference for those who live in a deadline-driven world and need the facts but not the frills.

The book's language reference is organized first by topic, followed by an alphabetical reference to the language's keywords, complete with syntax summaries and pointers to the topic references. The library reference is organized by header file, and each library chapter and class declaration presents the classes and types in alphabetical order, for easy lookup. Cross-references link related methods, classes, and other key features. This is an ideal resource for students as well as professional programmers.

When you're programming, you need answers to questions about language syntax or parameters required by library routines quickly. What, for example, is the C++ syntax to define an alias for a namespace? Just how do you create and use an iterator to work with the contents of a standard library container? C++ in a Nutshell is a concise desktop reference that answers these questions, putting the full power of this flexible, adaptable (but somewhat difficult to master) language at every C++ programmer's fingertips.

Chapter 1 Language Basics
1. Compilation Steps
2. Tokens
3. Comments
4. Character Sets
5. Alternative Tokens
6. Trigraphs
Chapter 2 Declarations
1. Declarations and Definitions
2. Scope
3. Name Lookup
4. Linkage
5. Type Declarations
6. Object Declarations
7. Namespaces
Chapter 3 Expressions
1. Lvalues and Rvalues
2. Type Conversions
3. Constant Expressions
4. Expression Evaluation
5. Expression Rules
Chapter 4 Statements
1. Expression Statements
2. Declarations
3. Compound Statements
4. Selections
5. Loops
6. Control Statements
7. Handling Exceptions
Chapter 5 Functions
1. Function Declarations
2. Function Definitions
3. Function Overloading
4. Operator Overloading
5. The main Function
Chapter 6 Classes
1. Class Definitions
2. Data Members
3. Member Functions
4. Inheritance
5. Access Specifiers
6. Friends
7. Nested Types
Chapter 7 Templates
1. Overview of Templates
2. Template Declarations
3. Function Templates
4. Class Templates
5. Specialization
6. Partial Specialization
7. Instantiation
8. Name Lookup
9. Tricks with Templates
10. Compiling Templates
Chapter 8 Standard Library
1. Overview of the Standard Library
2. C Library Wrappers
3. Wide and Multibyte Characters
4. Traits and Policies
5. Allocators
6. Numerics
Chapter 9 Input and Output
1. Introduction to I/O Streams
2. Text I/O
3. Binary I/O
4. Stream Buffers
5. Manipulators
6. Errors and Exceptions
Chapter 10 Containers, Iterators, and Algorithms
1. Containers
2. Iterators
3. Algorithms
Chapter 11 Preprocessor Reference
Chapter 12 Language Reference
Chapter 13 Library Reference
1. <algorithm>
2. <bitset>
3. <cassert>
4. <cctype>
5. <cerrno>
6. <cfloat>
7. <ciso646>
8. <climits>
9. <clocale>
10. <cmath>
11. <complex>
12. <csetjmp>
13. <csignal>
14. <cstdarg>
15. <cstddef>
16. <cstdio>
17. <cstdlib>
18. <cstring>
19. <ctime>
20. <cwchar>
21. <cwctype>
22. <deque>
23. <exception>
24. <fstream>
25. <functional>
26. <iomanip>
27. <ios>
28. <iosfwd>
29. <iostream>
30. <istream>
31. <iterator>
32. <limits>
33. <list>
34. <locale>
35. <map>
36. <memory>
37. <new>
38. <numeric>
39. <ostream>
40. <queue>
41. <set>
42. <sstream>
43. <stack>
44. <stdexcept>
45. <streambuf>
46. <string>
47. <strstream>
48. <typeinfo>
49. <utility>
50. <valarray>
51. <vector>

Appendix A Compiler Extensions
1. Borland C++ Builder and Kylix
2. GNU Compiler Collection
3. Microsoft Visual C++
Appendix B Projects
1. Blitz++
2. Boost
3. STLport
Glossary
Colophon

Title:

C++ In a Nutshell

By:

Ray Lischner

Publisher:

O'Reilly Media

Formats:

Print
Ebook
Safari Books Online

Print:

May 2003

Ebook:

June 2009

Pages:

810

Print ISBN:

978-0-596-00298-5

| ISBN 10:

0-596-00298-X

Ebook ISBN:

978-0-596-10382-8

| ISBN 10:

0-596-10382-4

Colophon

Our look is the result of reader comments, our own experimentation, and feedback from distribution channels. Distinctive covers complement our distinctive approach to technical topics, breathing personality and life into potentially dry subjects. The animal on the cover of C++ in a Nutshell is an Eastern chipmunk, a striped ground squirrel found mostly in eastern North America. Eastern chipmunks have five dark and two light stripes on their backs, extending from head to rump, and two stripes on their long, bushy tails. They are distinguished from other ground squirrels by the white stripes above and below their eyes. The coloration of chipmunks throughout North America varies but is quite uniform within regions.

Chipmunks often make their homes in sparse forests or farms, where they can build the entrances to their lodges in stone walls, broken trees, or thick underbrush. A lodge consists of a maze of tunnels leading to a large, leaf-lined nest. Chipmunks spend most of the daylight hours outdoors but head for their lodges before nightfall. Although they are excellent climbers, chipmunks live primarilyon the ground.

Chipmunks eat nuts, seeds, insects, and occasionally birds' eggs. Like all ground squirrels, they have large cheek pouches, sometimes extending as far back as their shoulders, in which they can store food. They collect and store nuts and seeds through the summer and fall. When the weather starts to get cool, all the chipmunks in a region suddenly disappear into their lodges, where they begin hibernation. On warm winter days one can often see chipmunk pawprints in the snow, as they will sometimes wake up and leave their lodges for brief periods when the temperature rises.

Mating season for Eastern chipmunks is mid-March to early April. The gestation period is 31 days, after which a litter of three to six is born. Baby chipmunks leave the lodge after one month and are mature by July.

The chipmunk most likely got its name from the noise it makes, which sounds like a loud "cheep." You can occasionally see a chipmunk hanging upside down from a tree branch "cheeping" its call. Matt Hutchinson was the production editor and copyeditor for C++ in a Nutshell. Sarah Sherman and Claire Cloutier provided quality control. Julie Hawks wrote the index. Derek Di Matteo and Mary Brady provided production assistance.

Ellie Volckhausen designed the cover of this book, based on a series design by Edie Freedman. The cover image is a 19th-century engraving from the Dover Pictorial Archive. Emma Colby produced the cover layout with QuarkXPress 4.1 using Adobe's ITC Garamond font.

David Futato designed the interior layout. This book was converted by Joe Wizda and Andrew Savikas to FrameMaker 5.5.6 with a format conversion tool created by Erik Ray, Jason McIntosh, Neil Walls, and Mike Sierra that uses Perl and XML technologies. The text font is Linotype Birka; the heading font is Adobe Myriad Condensed; and the code font is LucasFont's TheSans Mono Condensed. The illustrations that appear in the book were produced by Robert Romano and Jessamyn Read using Macromedia FreeHand 9 and Adobe Photoshop 6. The tip and warning icons were drawn by Christopher Bing. This colophon was written by Clairemarie Fisher O'Leary.

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3/4/2010

(2 of 2 customers found this review helpful)

4.0

O'Reilly RULES!

By Juan Melendez from Eightminds[@]

from Garfield, NJ

About Me Developer, Sys Admin

Pros

Accurate
Concise
Easy to understand
Helpful examples
Well-written

Cons

Best Uses

Intermediate
Novice
Student

Comments about oreilly C++ In a Nutshell:

Thank you - thank you - thank you O'Reily Media!!!

I'm so happy to see that a few companies such as yourself "gets it". DRM eBooks are a disaster. I have purchased so many eBooks in the past that I can't use now because of one reason or other.

Now I feel like when I purchase an eBook it truly is mine. You have won a loyal customer here!

12/22/2009

(1 of 1 customers found this review helpful)

4.0

A must have for any C++ Programmer

By MrHacks

from St. Louis, MO

About Me Developer

Pros

Concise
Well-written

Cons

Not comprehensive enough

Best Uses

Expert
Intermediate
Novice
Student

Comments about oreilly C++ In a Nutshell:

A concise book on everything that is in C++.

6/12/2008

(4 of 4 customers found this review helpful)

4.0

A concise and clear reference. Not an introduction

By Anonymous

from Undisclosed

Comments about oreilly C++ In a Nutshell:

This book is concise, readable, and useful. As it makes clear on the cover, this is a reference book, and dives straight into very intense details of the syntax of C++. It is meant as the kind of book you can check when code that you thought should work isn't compiling, or when you want to know the proper way to write something particular. In fact, it reads quite like a plain-English version of the C++ standard itself.

It is perhaps surprising that the order of the chapters matches the abstraction level of each topic; starting with the parsing of characters in a source file, and working up through simple expressions to functions, classes, and finally to the standard libraries provided to assist you in common tasks. This may not be the order that the reader becomes interested in the topics, but it reflects the nature of this book as a reference rather than a cover-to-cover gripping read.

Even that first chapter contains treasures, such as the importance of spaces in nested template declarations, where ">>" would be parsed incorrectly. As well as statements of fact about the language, it includes a few human touches like using words that most of us recognise ("source file", when the standard says "translation unit"), and even advice not to use trigraphs; an obsolete part of the language which is still valid. Later, it warns about the safety of iterators, which can become almost as invalid as pointers, but doesn't spend long on stylistic advice, a bit more of which might be welcome. It dwells more on templates and containers, perhaps because they are less familiar to many readers.

There are lots of short examples of code, particularly in explaining how certain keywords are used and misused. There are cases where something might look like a type or a function; cases where a complicated pointer might be confusing about what it addresses, as well as more familiar cases about the scope of variables that might hide others of the same name. Again, these examples tend to be extremely short and to the point. There are a number of other examples of complete programs, covering a couple of pages, which have several classes with real functionality.

There are a decent number of cross references to other chapters, and some of the same information is repeated in several places; for example the "language reference" (chapter 12) lists every reserved word, with a half page description of its purpose, and refers to related sections that cover the topic in more detail. There were still occasions when it took me longer to find the page I wanted, than I had hoped. Perhaps the style of the index and referencing will become more familiar with use.

Seeing everything together, I was struck by how many innovative features are in the language, and most of them good. While Perl, Python, Java and the other languages we are familiar with have their own strengths (consider, for example, how Perl goes out of its way to let you write the same behaviour in many ways), and admitting that not everything in C++ is good (some people don't use exceptions for fear of ambiguity over resource ownership and clean-up), it was really inspiring to see what C++ has: multiple inheritance, virtual functions, exceptions, templates, dynamic casting, operator overloading, the standard library, namespaces, and so on.

By far the largest part of the book is the standard library reference, which is a good thing. The author is obviously pleased with this, and devotes more than half of the pages to explaining each function. Languages live or die by the capabilities (and elegance) of what comes "in the box". Edinburgh University's ML was an interesting-ish thing to study, but didn't help much when you wanted to interact with the real world. PHP is a cute language for web designers who think they can program, but its library is shockingly haphazard and incomplete. The C++ standard library is remarkable in its wealth of templates for storing data. Containers, iterators, maps, vectors, and the various other methods are covered with delight, encouraging you to get on with programming your new algorithms, instead of reimplementing Donald Knuth's. It also includes all of the C standard library, and various new methods, too.

In summary, this book is a good volume to have on the shelf for those occasions when your C++ compiler answers back about your syntax for subtle language features, and good to have on your desk when you want to use the standard library. Personally, I would have liked a bit more advice about what is efficient, or what is risky. It is very clearly and concisely written, which is a great benefit. Overall, a marked success.

1/12/2006

(1 of 1 customers found this review helpful)

4.0

C++ In a Nutshell

By Anonymous

from Undisclosed

Comments about oreilly C++ In a Nutshell:

The book "C++ In a Nutshell" by Ray Lischner is recommended for users who are already familiar with the C++ language, its style, and coding conventions. Although the first third of the book deals with the basics of the language, users who are new to C++ will find themselves looking for a more tutorial-like reference when trying out features for the first time; to the book's credit, most subject areas are methodically touched upon but often additional explanations and examples would be useful.

For more experienced programmers, the book can be a source of a wealth of information and can be a big time saver. A whole chapter designated as a language reference allows for quick lookup of obscure C++ constructs. Here, the spirit of the book is captured perfectly as syntax summaries are given using a modified BNF. Probably the most useful part of the book is the library reference that provides complete descriptions of all the classes in the C++ standard library. This section itself is likely to save one from spending hours on googling for small bits of information.

Thus, for those new to C++ something like "Practical C++ Programming" by Steve Oualline would likely provide a more useful introduction to the language. However, for those with the experience to know what they are looking for "C++ In a Nutshell" is a very good reference.

1/12/2005

5.0

The best, most indispensable compact" reference!"

By Anonymous

from Undisclosed

Comments about oreilly C++ In a Nutshell:

This is a wonderful reference that absolutely deserves a space on your shelf right next to Stroustrop's White Book. I own very few books with such clear and informative descriptions of both advanced and "basic" language features. Highly useful.

1/9/2004

5.0

C++ in a Nutshell Review

By Stewart Behymer Pensacola LUG

from Undisclosed

Comments about oreilly C++ In a Nutshell:

The C++ in a Nutshell book by O'Reilly gives the reader all the information he or she may need to utilize the powerful and complex C++ language. The book is broken into two main sections. The first section covers the language of C++. The second section is a library reference.

Section one does not give examples of nuance of the C++ language but it is not suppose to since it is a Nutshell book. However, it does an excellent job of covering the language and providing examples for the most used aspects of C++. The Nutshell series has always been a resource in which you can find answers quickly.

The second section is the library reference. This section helped me tremendously because I have not memorized nor do I intend to memorize all the class definitions and member functions. The C++ in a Nutshell book is an invaluable reference that sits on my desk all times. Whether you are making a living at programming C++ or simply a person interested in the C++ language the C++ in a Nutshell is a must have.

11/25/2003

5.0

C++ in a Nutshell Review

By anomuous

from Undisclosed

Comments about oreilly C++ In a Nutshell:

My long waited book on C++ from O'Reilly. It's more concise, examples are easier to trace and understand than Java in a Nutshell. For C++ is a extremelly difficult and complex language, I think it's currently the best book you can find for simple C++ algorithum and comprhensive reference on the market.

I hope the future versions could have further remarks/explainations, on the code expamples for the code logic. It can help beginners like me to understand the code examples easier.

10/17/2003

5.0

C++ in a Nutshell Review

By Don Kim

from Undisclosed

Comments about oreilly C++ In a Nutshell:

While not a tutorial, it is definetely an excellent reference book to have around when your stuck on a problem with C++, and need a quick look up and refresher. Plus, unlike the tomes you'd typically use for heavy duty references, this is small enough that you can carry it in your backpack when your away from the office... a great "pocket dictionary" for c++.

I highly recommend it!

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Chapter 1 Language Basics

Compilation Steps

Tokens

Comments

Character Sets

Alternative Tokens

Trigraphs

Chapter 2 Declarations

Declarations and Definitions

Scope

Name Lookup

Linkage

Type Declarations

Object Declarations

Namespaces

Chapter 3 Expressions

Lvalues and Rvalues

Type Conversions

Constant Expressions

Expression Evaluation

Expression Rules

Chapter 4 Statements

Expression Statements

Declarations

Compound Statements

Selections

Loops

Control Statements

Handling Exceptions

Chapter 5 Functions

Function Declarations

Function Definitions

Function Overloading

Operator Overloading

The main Function

Chapter 6 Classes

Class Definitions

Data Members

Member Functions

Inheritance

Access Specifiers

Friends

Nested Types

Chapter 7 Templates

Overview of Templates

Template Declarations

Function Templates

Class Templates

Specialization

Partial Specialization

Instantiation

Name Lookup

Tricks with Templates

Compiling Templates

Chapter 8 Standard Library

Overview of the Standard Library

C Library Wrappers

Wide and Multibyte Characters

Traits and Policies

Allocators

Numerics

Chapter 9 Input and Output

Introduction to I/O Streams

Text I/O

Binary I/O

Stream Buffers

Manipulators

Errors and Exceptions

Chapter 10 Containers, Iterators, and Algorithms

Containers

Iterators

Algorithms

Chapter 11 Preprocessor Reference

Chapter 12 Language Reference

Chapter 13 Library Reference

<algorithm>

<bitset>

<cassert>

<cctype>

<cerrno>