Safe C++: How to avoid common mistakes

06/16/2012 · No Responses

It’s easy to make lots of programming mistakes in C++—in fact, any program over a few hundred lines is likely to contain bugs. With this book, you’ll learn about many common coding errors that C++ programmers produce, along with rules and strategies you can use to avoid them.

Author Vladimir Kushnir shows you how to use his Safe C++ library, based in part on programming practices developed by the C++ community. You’ll not only find recipes for identifying errors during your program’s compilation, runtime, and testing phases, you’ll learn a comprehensive approach for making your C++ code safe and bug-free.

Get recipes for handling ten different error types, including memory leaks and uninitialized variables
Discover problems C++ inherited from C, like pointer arithmetic
Insert temporary and permanent sanity checks to catch errors at runtime
Apply bug prevention techniques, such as using separate classes for each data type
Pursue a testing strategy to hunt and fix one bug at a time—before your code goes into production

Table of Contents
Part I: A Bug-Hunting Strategy for C++
Chapter 1. Where Do C++ Bugs Come From?
Chapter 2. When to Catch a Bug
Chapter 3. What to Do When We Encounter an Error at Runtime

Part II: Bug Hunting: One Bug at a Time
Chapter 4. Index Out of Bounds
Chapter 5. Pointer Arithmetic
Chapter 6. Invalid Pointers, References, and Iterators
Chapter 7. Uninitialized Variables
Chapter 8. Memory Leaks
Chapter 9. Dereferencing NULL Pointers
Chapter 10. Copy Constructors and Assignment Operators
Chapter 11. Avoid Writing Code in Destructors
Chapter 12. How to Write Consistent Comparison Operators
Chapter 13. Errors When Using Standard C Libraries

Part III: The Joy of Bug Hunting: From Testing to Debugging to Production
Chapter 14. General Testing Principles
Chapter 15. Debug-On-Error Strategy
Chapter 16. Making Your Code Debugger-Friendly
Chapter 17. Conclusion
Appendix A. Source Code for the scpp Library Used in This Book
Appendix B. Source Code for the files scpp_assert.hpp and scpp_assert.cpp
Appendix C. Source Code for the file scpp_vector.hpp
Appendix D. Source Code for the file scpp_array.hpp
Appendix E. Source Code for the file scpp_matrix.hpp
Appendix F. Source Code for the file scpp_types.hpp
Appendix G. Source Code for the file scpp_refcountptr.hpp
Appendix H. Source Code for the file scpp_scopedptr.hpp
Appendix I. Source Code for the file scpp_ptr.hpp
Appendix J. Source Code for the file scpp_date.hpp and scpp_date.cpp