This overview of C++ presents the key design, programming, and language-technical concepts using examples to give the reader a feel for the language. C++ is a general-purpose programming language with a bias towards systems programming that supports efficient low-level computation, data abstraction, object-oriented programming, and generic programming. 1

s left as an exercise. Chapter 1 is a quick tour of the major concepts and features of the C++ programming language. Its purpose is to give a high-level acquaintance with C++. Detailed explanations of language features and techniques are postponed to later chapters. The discussion focuses on the language features supporting data abstraction and object- 2 Notes to the Reader Chapter 0 oriented programming, but also briefly introduces the key features used for procedural programming. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 describe features of C++ that are not involved in defining new types: the fundamental types, expressions, and control structures for C++ programs. In other words, they describe the subset of C++ that is essentially C. They go into considerably greater detail than Chapter 1. Chapters 5 through 8 describe C++'s facilities for defining new types, features that do not have counterparts in C. Chapter 5 presents the basic class concept, showing how user-defined types (classe

This overview of C++ presents the key design, programming, and language-technical concepts using examples to give the reader a feel for the language. C++ is a general-purpose programming language with a bias towards systems programming that supports efficient low-level computation, data abstraction, object-oriented programming, and generic programming.

classes (2.5.4, 12.3) are C++'s primary tool for doing that.