Creating Portable, Reusable Programs with Tools.h++ (5 day course)

General Description

Rogue Wave's Tools.h++ has become a defacto standard for C++ foundation classes. This five day course teaches how to use these classes to their greatest advantage to create highly efficient and portable programs, with code that is both understandable and reusable.

Outline

Day 1:

1. Course introduction:
   • What makes for an understandable, portable, reusable, and efficient program.
   • Why each of these goals is important and how they interact.
2. An overview of the Rogue Wave class libraries
3. A survey of the characteristics of Tools.h++ classes and how they help meet the goals
4. Tools.h++ foundation classes
5. The string classes
   • Lab 1 - A text pattern class
6. RWDate
   • Lab 2 - A calendar generation program
7. RWTime
   • Lab 3 - A date/time pattern class

Day 2

1. Internationalization - an introduction
   • Classes to enable internationalization
   • Internationalization support in the foundation classes
   • Internationalizing dates, time,currency, and numbers
   • Lab 4 - Internationalized pattern classes
2. How the Rogue Wave virtual streams take up where iostreams leave off
   • ASCII streams that are portable between machine architectures
   • Binary streams
   • Network based streams
   • Special streambuf classes to support clipboard and DDE I/O
   • RWFile / RWFileManager
   • Lab 5 - RWFile and virtual streams

Day 3

1. Collection classes: the basic concepts
   • Value vs. reference collections: how they differ
   • Object identity vs. object equality: when each is important
   • Accessing collections: iterators, indexing, find functions, apply functions
2. A survey of the Tools.h++ collection classes; how to find the right one to use
3. The three sets of collections: generic, template, and persistable.

Day 4

1. The seventeen data structures supported by Tools.h++ collections: how to find the right one for your task
   • Lab 6 - Using collections: sets
   • Lab 7 - Using collections: dictionaries
2. Other advanced tools classes:
   • Bit vector classes
   • Benchmarking classes
   • Model-view-controller support

Day 5

1. The Rogue Wave software method for creating portable, reusable programs:
   • The "golden rules"
   • Using standard types
   • Using macros and typedefs
   • Handling compiler limitations
   • Design conventions
   • Coding and implementation conventions
   • Common function interfaces across classes