Structure of This Book

We start by covering the basics of the language and the library together in Parts I and II. These parts cover enough material to let you, the reader, write significant programs. Most C++ programmers need to know essentially everything covered in this portion of the book.

In addition to teaching the basics of C++, the material in Parts I and II serves another important purpose: By using the abstract facilities defined by the library, you will become more comfortable with using high-level programming techniques. The library facilities are themselves abstract data types that are usually written in C++. The library can be defined using the same class-construction features that are available to any C++ programmer. Our experience in teaching C++ is that by first using well-designed abstract types, readers find it easier to understand how to build their own types.

Only after a thorough grounding in using the library—and writing the kinds of abstract programs that the library allows—do we move on to those C++ features that will enable you to write your own abstractions. Parts III and IV focus on writing abstractions in the form of classes. Part III covers the fundamentals; Part IV covers more specialized facilities.

In Part III, we cover issues of copy control, along with other techniques to make classes that are as easy to use as the built-in types. Classes are the foundation for object-oriented and generic programming, which we also cover in Part III. C++ Primer concludes with Part IV, which covers features that are of most use in structuring large, complicated systems. We also summarize the library algorithms in Appendix A.