Part IV. Object-Oriented and Generic Programming

CONTENTS

Chapter 15 Object-Oriented Programming

Chapter 16 Templates and Generic Programming

Part IV extends the discussion of Part III by covering how C++ supports object-oriented and generic programming.

Chapter 15 covers inheritance and dynamic binding. Along with data abstraction, inheritance and dynamic binding are fundamental to object-oriented programming.

Chapter 16 covers function and class templates. Templates let us write generic classes and functions that are independent of type.

Writing our own object-oriented or generic types requires a fairly good understanding of C++. Fortunately, we can use OO and generic types without understanding the details of how to build them. In fact, the standard library uses the facilities we’ll study in Chapters 15 and 16 extensively, and we’ve used the library types and algorithms without needing to know how they are implemented. Readers, therefore, should understand that Part IV covers advanced topics. Writing templates or object-oriented classes requires a good understanding of the basics of C++ and a good grasp of how to define more basic classes.