| Section | 1 |
|---|---|
| Instructor(s) | Spertus, Michael (spertus) |
| Location | JCL 390 |
| Meeting Times | Thursday 5:30pm - 8:30pm |
| Fulfills | Elective |
Course Description
This course covers the major features of C++ in an accelerated fashion suitable both for experienced C++ programmers and programmers who are new to C++ as described in the prerequisites below. The course teaches how to get the most out of the current C++20 language, which "feels like a new language." It also discusses how to workaround in older versions of C++.
A dominant theme of the course is how to use the unique features of C++ to operate at a high-level of abstraction to support powerful design idioms and improve maintainability while also achieving the kind of performance and low-level control usually associated with lower-level languages such as C and even assembler language.
Course Contents
• Great ideas of C++ (Overview)
• Classes and Object-orientation
• Classes and Object-orientation (cont), C++ Libraries (including Boost)
• Overloading, memory management, and their associated (far from obvious) consequences and idioms
• Low-level and performance programming
• Templates, specialization, and concepts
• Concurrency in C++, including cache-conscious programming
• Concurrency in C++ (cont)
• Type traits and introduction to metaprogramming
• Overview of C++ best practices
Coursework
Weekly programming assignments make up 2/3 of the grade. The student can choose between taking a final or writing an independent project for the remaining 1/3 of the grade.
Course Textbook
No textbooks required, but please download a copy of the C++ standard from http://wg21.link/std . A list of useful books and websites will be made available.
About the Instructor
"As the founder of Boost (www.boost.org), the first and best known C++ library repository, and also as a long-time voting member of the C++ standards committee, I have come into contact with many of the notables of the C++ world. Mike Spertus is right up there with the best of them." -- Beman Dawes
Michael Spertus is a Senior Principal Engineer for Dev Tools at Amazon and was previously a Fellow at Symantec. He is also a member of the C++ Standards Committee, where he has authored over 30 standard proposals. He has been involved in C/C++ languages since the 1980s, when he helped write one of the first commercial MS-DOS C compiler for the IBM PC-AT.
Core Programming
Students are not required to know C++ (although the course is also very appropriate for experienced C++ programmers). However, they are expected to be programmers in some language. This course requires competency in Unix and Linux. If you attended the MPCS Unix Bootcamp you covered the required material. If you did not, please review the UChicago CS Student Resource Guide here: https://uchicago-cs.github.io/student-resource-guide/.
This class is scheduled at a time that conflicts with these other classes: