About This Course
Get an idea of what we'll learn in this course.
We'll cover the following
Overview
This course provides recipes to help you get the most out of the C++ STL (Standard Template Library), including new features introduced with C++20.
C++ is a rich and powerful language. Built upon C, with syntactic extensions for type safety, generic programming, and object-oriented programming, C++ is essentially a low-level language. The STL provides a broad set of higher-level classes, functions, and algorithms to make your programming job easier, more effective, and less prone to error.
Prerequisite knowledge
This course presumes that you have a basic understanding of C++, including syntax, structure, data types, classes and objects, templates, and the STL. The recipes and examples in this course presume that you understand the need to #include certain headers to use library functions. The recipes don’t usually list all the necessary headers, preferring to focus on the techniques at hand.
The C++20 standard
The C++ language is standardized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) on a roughly three-year cycle. The current standard is called C++20 (which was preceded by C++17, C++14, and C++11 before that). C++20 was approved in September 2020.
C++20 adds many important features to the language and the STL. New features like
format, modules, ranges, and more will have a significant impact on the way we use the STL.
Intended audience
This course is for intermediate to advanced C++ programmers who want to get more out of the C++20 Standard Template Library. Basic knowledge of coding and C++ concepts are necessary to get the most out of this course.
Structure
Chapter 1, "New C++20 Features": Introduces the new STL features in C++20. This chapter aims to familiarize you with the new language features so you may use them with the STL.
Chapter 2, "General STL Features": Discusses modern STL features added in recent C++ versions.
Chapter 3, "STL Containers": Covers the STL's comprehensive library of containers.
Chapter 4, "Compatible Iterators": Shows you how to use and create STL-compatible iterators.
Chapter 5, "Lambda Expressions": Covers the use of lambdas with STL functions and algorithms.
Chapter 6, "STL Algorithms": Provides recipes for using and creating STL-compatible
algorithms.
Chapter 7, "Strings, Stream, and Formatting": Describes the STL string and formatter classes.
Chapter 8, "Utility Classes": Covers STL utilities for date-and-time, smart pointers, optionals, and more.
Chapter 9, "Concurrency and Parallelism": Describes support for concurrency, including threads, async, atomic types, and more.
Chapter 10, "Using the File System": Covers the std::filesystem classes and how to put them to use with the latest advancements that came out with C++20.
Chapter 11, "A Few More Ideas": Provides a few more solutions, including a trie class, string split, and more. This provides advanced examples on how to put the STL to use for real-world problems.