Traditional procedural programming focuses on actions – functions. Object oriented programming focuses on data (objects) and the operations on objects. You want to look at items that you will be coding, and think, what makes this information up? and, What things can it do, and/or be done to it? Objects in the physical realm are…
C++ has some interesting keywords that allow you to do different things. For example, if you want to make sure that you don’t accidentally change any values in a method, you can use the const keyword. Now this is similar to how you use it on a parameter for a function, but since you don’t…
Something that can happen in larger projects is that a header file for a class is included in multiple files. While this seems trivial, some compilers can run into a problem of thinking it’s multiple classes with the same name. Luckily, C++ gives us a method to prevent this from happening, by using a built…
Everything we’ve looked at so far is what is known as an instance member. That is, each instance of a class – called and object, has it’s own set of properties and methods. This is mostly what is done. So if we look at two Circle objects for example, the radius of one circle is…
We’ve talked about arrays and objects before, but now we’re going to look at an array of objects. Consider a situation where you had a class called Student. While you would often need to work with a singular student, you could very likely also need to have multiple students, for example, if you were talking…
In C++ there are two ways to process strings. C-Strings which are an array of characters terminated by a null character, or the C++ style string object. The string class hides the details of how the string is stored from the user – remember one of the tasks of a class is to abstract the…
We’ve talked about abstraction before when working with functions. The idea being using a simple to remember name, to hide a (potentially) complex process involving lots of steps. Classes are often used in the same way. They should be thought of as a “black box” which the programmer doesn’t need to worry about how the…
Previously we looked at a class Circle, which had a property radius that was publicly available. That means that any other class, or your main program could change that value. This is a problem for two reasons: First, that data could be tampered with. Another function, class, etc could directly access the variable and change…
