Hands-On Design Patterns with C++ - Second Edition

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An Introduction to Inheritance and Polymorphism

C++ is, first and foremost, an object-oriented language, and objects are the fundamental building blocks of a C++ program. Class hierarchies are used to express relationships and interactions between different parts of a software system, define and implement interfaces between components, and organize data and code. While this isn’t a book for teaching C++, the aim of this chapter is to give the reader enough knowledge about C++ language features as they relate to classes and inheritance, which will be used in later chapters. To that end, we won’t attempt to completely describe the C++ tools for working with classes but introduce the concepts and language constructs that will be used throughout ...