CMake Best Practices: Discover proven techniques for creating and maintaining programming projects with CMake

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Key benefits

Understand what CMake is, how it works, and how to interact with it

Discover how to properly create and maintain well-structured CMake projects

Explore tools and techniques to get the most out of your CMake project

Description

CMake is a powerful tool used to perform a wide variety of tasks, so finding a good starting point for learning CMake is difficult. This book cuts to the core and covers the most common tasks that can be accomplished with CMake without taking an academic approach. While the CMake documentation is comprehensive, it is often hard to find good examples of how things fit together, especially since there are lots of dirty hacks and obsolete solutions available on the internet. This book focuses on helping you to tie things together and create clean and maintainable projects with CMake. You'll not only get to grips with the basics but also work through real-world examples of structuring large and complex maintainable projects and creating builds that run in any programming environment. You'll understand the steps to integrate and automate various tools for improving the overall software quality, such as testing frameworks, fuzzers, and automatic generation of documentation. And since writing code is only half of the work, the book also guides you in creating installers and packaging and distributing your software. All this is tailored to modern development workflows that make heavy use of CI/CD infrastructure. By the end of this CMake book, you'll be able to set up and maintain complex software projects using CMake in the best way possible.

What you will learn

Get to grips with architecting a well-structured CMake project

Modularize and reuse CMake code across projects

Integrate various tools for static analysis, linting, formatting, and documentation into a CMake project

Get hands-on with performing cross-platform builds

Discover how you can easily use different toolchains with CMake

Get started with crafting a well-defined and portable build environment for your project

What do you get with a Packt Subscription?

Free for first 7 days. $19.99 p/m after that. Cancel any time!

Unlimited ad-free access to the largest independent learning library in tech. Access this title and thousands more!

50+ new titles added per month, including many first-to-market concepts and exclusive early access to books as they are being written.

Innovative learning tools, including AI book assistants, code context explainers, and text-to-speech.

Thousands of reference materials covering every tech concept you need to stay up to date.

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Frequently bought together

Modern CMake for C++

Feb 2022 460 pages

4.2 (23)

eBook

€8.99 ~~€28.99~~

CMake Best Practices

May 2022 406 pages

4.8 (4)

eBook

€8.99 ~~€28.99~~

CMake Cookbook

Sep 2018 606 pages

3.2 (9)

eBook

€8.99 ~~€36.99~~

Total € 117.97

€35.99

€45.99

Total € 117.97

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Salim Pamukcu Jan 19, 2024

detailed, clean, updated information with examples

Feefo Verified review

POE Jun 03, 2022

While Visual Studio is seemingly the industry standard for building, testing, and packaging C++ projects, CMake is an important and stable alternative. This book provides great insights, instructions, and samples. After reading the book, it was clear that the target readers are software engineers with build system experience. If you are not a C++ developer, this book might not be for you.The authors begin the book with a quick overview of CMake, how to install it, and then building a project. True to the book’s title, best practices with regards to using CMake are highlighted throughout the book. There are not frivolous chapters; all content is applicable. Some of the most intriguing content covered include working with Docker, automation, reproducible build environments, and fuzzing tools.A nice resource to have if you need a new C++ build system or want to further your knowledge of CMake.

Amazon Verified review

Anonymous Jun 22, 2022

Disclosure:I was a technical reviewer for this book. I was not paid by the publisher, but did get a copy of the print book and was given an online subscription at Packt.com. My name appears in the print copy as I spent time proving the Github projects were working as well as giving feedback on each chapter as the drafts came out.Review:The authors' approach is to glean from their own experiences the most useful information about CMake to present to other engineers. It is more a thorough tutorial than a reference book. This book brought new uses and approaches to my attention that I had not seen before, despite having used CMake for about 5 years.This book covers a great deal of syntax, but also relies heavily on examples to help the reader understand the concepts. In addition to what the book contains, a Github project is maintained with examples for each chapter. I highly recommend pulling the sources for those examples and trying them out yourself.I was particularly impressed with how much of the book covered interacting with other tools, and I don't mean just the compiler and linker. There is coverage of using sanitizers and fuzzing tools and auto-generating documentation. There is coverage of how to work with package managers like Conan and vcpkg, and even how to structure your CMake to act like like a poor man's package manager if you don't have one. One example of this pulls in all of Qt and builds it from source with just a few lines of CMake code. From there it can be used as a dependency as if it were a library you created yourself.I most often use CMake for projects where I'm cross-compiling and there is ample coverage of toolchain files and other concerns for embedded systems. As an example of something new to me with this book is using an emulator like qemu to run tests on a host instead of always on a target.To reinforce the learning process with each chapter, questions are provided at the end with answers in the back of the book.For those who have large existing projects and are considering the non-trivial task of migrating your project to CMake, this book gives you some strategies to consider. The authors have significant experience doing this and present a few approaches with discussion of which approach is best for the situation.A minor annoyance I have is that some of the illustrations in the book are screen captures and the appearance of white text on a dark background, while pleasing on a computer screen, is less pleasing in book form. There is at least one page where cmake-gui is presented and the size of the image is small enough that it's very hard to make out the text on it. By and large, the examples are very clear and what I am saying here about screen captures doesn't detract significantly from the book.I like that there is an index, but I've already found at least one thing not indexed that I was searching for (i.e. 'qemu'). I'm being picky here I realize, and I was still able to find the reference by scanning through the chapter dealing with cross-compilation.Overall I'm very happy with the book. Congrats to Dominik and Mustafa and thank you for putting all the work in to create it. I hope other readers enjoy it as much as I did.

Rohan Jul 31, 2022

The book's introduction by the authors includes an explanation of CMake, instructions for installing it, and instructions for building a project. In keeping with the title of the book, recommended practises for using CMake are emphasised frequently. There are no pointless chapters; all of the information is useful. Working with Docker, automation, reproducible build environments, and fuzzing tools are some of the more fascinating topics covered.

CMake Best Practices: Discover proven techniques for creating and maintaining programming projects with CMake

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