Preface

Countless programmers have learned C++ from previous editions of C++ Primer. During that time, C++ has matured greatly: Its focus, and that of its programming community, has widened from looking mostly at machine efficiency to devoting more attention to programmer efficiency.

In 2011, the C++ standards committee issued a major revision to the ISO C++ standard. This revised standard is latest step in C++’s evolution and continues the emphasis on programmer efficiency. The primary goals of the new standard are to

• Make the language more uniform and easier to teach and to learn
• Make the standard libraries easier, safer, and more efficient to use
• Make it easier to write efficient abstractions and libraries

In this edition, we have completely revised the C++ Primer to use the latest standard. You can get an idea of how extensively the new standard has affected C++ by reviewing the New Features Table of Contents, which lists the sections that cover new material and appears on page xxi.

Some additions in the new standard, such as auto for type inference, are pervasive. These facilities make the code in this edition easier to read and to understand. Programs (and programmers!) can ignore type details, which makes it easier to concentrate on what the program is intended to do. Other new features, such as smart pointers and move-enabled containers, let us write more sophisticated classes without having to contend with the intricacies of resource management. As a result, we can start to teach how to write your own classes much earlier in the book than we did in the Fourth Edition. We—and you—no longer have to worry about many of the details that stood in our way under the previous standard.

C++11

We’ve marked those parts of the text that cover features defined by the new standard, with a marginal icon. We hope that readers who are already familiar with the core of C++ will find these alerts useful in deciding where to focus their attention. We also expect that these icons will help explain error messages from compilers that might not yet support every new feature. Although nearly all of the examples in this book have been compiled under the current release of the GNU compiler, we realize some readers will not yet have access to completely updated compilers. Even though numerous capabilities have been added by the latest standard, the core language remains unchanged and forms the bulk of the material that we cover. Readers can use these icons to note which capabilities may not yet be available in their compiler.