Lesson 1

Welcome to Building Classes in C++, the second course in the C++ for C Programmers series.
This course teaches you the basics of working with classes and objects in C++. It introduces you to one important aspect of object-oriented programming (OOP) which is encapsulation and prepares you to continue exploring OOP techniques and concepts.
After completing this course, you will be able to write C++ programs that:

1. Use the class construct to define Abstract Data Types (ADTs) and implement encapsulation of data and behavior
2. Write member functions that act on member data
3. Use constructor and destructor member functions to manage class-defined objects
4. Implement useful dynamic data structures such as a dynamically allocated stack, a bounds-checking array, and a singly linked list
5. Use an efficient object disposal scheme

Visual C++ provides two ways of building a C/C++ program. The easiest (and most common) way is to build within the Visual C++ development environment. The other way is to build from a command prompt using command-line tools. In either case, you can create your source files using the Visual C++ source editor or a third-party editor of your choice.
If your program uses a makefile rather than a .vcxproj file, you can still build it in the development environment as an external project.

This module reviews object-oriented programming in C++. It assumes the reader has prior experience programming in C++ or another language and is, therefore, familiar with control statements for selection and repetition, basic data types, arrays, and functions. If your first course was in C++, you can skim this chapter for review or just use it as a reference as needed. However, you should read it more carefully if your C++ course did not emphasize object-oriented design.
If your first course followed an object-oriented approach but was in another language, you should concentrate on the differences between C++ syntax and that of the language that you know. If you have programmed only in a language that was not object-oriented, you will need to concentrate on aspects of object-oriented programming and classes as well as C++ syntax. We begin the module with an introduction to the C++ environment and the runtime system. Control structures and statements are then discussed, followed by a discussion of functions.
Next we cover the basic data types of C++, called primitive data types. Then we introduce classes and objects. Because C++ uses pointers to reference objects, we discuss how to declare and use pointer variables. The C++ standard library provides a rich collection of classes that simplify programming in C++. The first C++ class that we cover is the string class. The string class provides several functions and an operator + (concatenation) that process sequences of characters (strings). We also review arrays in C++. We cover both one- and two-dimensional arrays and C-strings, which are arrays of characters. Finally we discuss input/output. We also show how to use streams and the console for input/output and how to write functions that let us use the stream input/output operations on objects.