Part 5: Considerations for Safer Programming in C++

The goal of this part is to understand what can be done as a programmer to make C++ a safer language, which in turn will help make our programs more robust. At this point, we will have learned a lot about C++, from language essentials to implementing OO designs in C++. We will have added additional skills to our repertoire, such as using friends and operator overloading, exception handling, templates, and the STL. We will have even looked in depth at a handful of popular design patterns. We will know that we can do nearly anything in C++, but we will have also seen that having so much power can leave room for cavalier programming and grave errors, which can lead to unwieldy code that is difficult to maintain.

In this section, we will review what we have learned throughout the book with a keen eye toward understanding how we can work to make our code bulletproof. We will work toward a set of core programming guidelines to follow...