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Polymorphism and Abstraction
In an inheritance scenario, a parent class is configured to provide its child with the basic foundation the child needs. Although a child can implement a new behavior not available on the parent object, sometimes a child object will need a customized implementation of a behavior that has already been configured with its parent. That is what happens for example when inheriting a sphere from a circle class. Both have a characteristic called Area but the area is calculated differently on each shape.

Exceptions and Classes
Exceptions are an integral and unavoidable part of the operating system and programming. One way you can handle them is to create classes whose behaviors are prepared to deal with abnormal behavior. There are two main ways you can involve classes with exception handling routines: classes that are involved in exceptions of their own operations and classes that are specially written to handle exceptions for other classes.

Operator Overloading
Operator overloading is the ability to tell the compiler how to perform a certain operation when its corresponding operator is used on one or more variables.

Object Construction and Destruction
In order to further customize the behavior of an object, you should make sure that it completely controls its member variables. An object should "know" what kind of values its variables hold and what values are not acceptable. As a starting point, when calling an object from another function, you should know what value a particular member is holding, before performing any operation. To solve this problem, one solution is to provide a special function that would initialize the member variables.

The Methods of a Class
The primary motivation of using classes in a program is to create objects as complete as possible. An object must be able to handle its own business so that the other objects of the program or of another program would only need to know which object can take care of a particular need they have. A regular variable, as a member of an object, cannot handle assignments. This job is handled by particular functions declared as members of a class. A function as a member of a class is also called a Method. On this site, the words "method" and "function", when associated with a class, will refer to the same thing: a member function of the class.

Introduction to Classes
C++ offers three techniques of defining a new data type: a structure, a class, and a union. These are also referred to as composite data types. Learn: Object Creation and Access, Global Objects, Access to a Member of a Class, Type-Defining a Class, Class Forward Definition, The Access Levels of a Class, Initializing Each Member of a Class, Initializing an Object as a Whole, Static Member Variables, Techniques of Creating a Classic C Styles Object, References, Constant Objects and more.

User-Defined Types
The data types we used in the previous lessons for our variables were directly recognized by the C++ compiler. For this reason they are referred to as built-in types. Those data types are convenient in most scenarios. Sometimes you will need to expand on these types. The C++ language provides you great flexibility on re-defining these existing types or re-defining new ones. Learn: The Type Definition, Constant Values, Macro Definition of a Constant, User-Defined Constants, Built-In Constants and more.

Exception Handling
During the execution of a program, the computer will face two types of situations: those it is prepared to deal with and those it doesn't like. Learn: Exceptional Behaviors, Facing an Exception, Writing Local Exceptions, Catching Multiple Exceptions, Nesting Exceptions, Exceptions and Functions.

Data Input/Output
The values and expressions used in C++ are displayed using the cout extractor. To make the displaying of data more realistic, the cout is configured to handle or format data to any desired result. While the cout (as a class) is defined in the iostream file, some other files provide other extensive techniques for displaying data to the console. The C language also is equipped with other formatting functions used for the same purpose. The ability to create a program made of mixed C and C++ language enhances these formatting possibilities.

Strings
Learn the following: Declaring and Initializing an Array of Characters, Streaming an Array of Characters, Multidimensional Arrays of Characters, Declaring a Pointer to Characters, Declaring and Initializing an Array of Characters, Requesting an Array of Characters, Arrays of Characters and Pointers, Dynamic Arrays of Characters, Passing an Array of Characters, Returning an array of Characters, Multidimensional Arrays of Characters, Double-Dimensional Arrays Declaration, Two-Dimensional Arrays of Characters and Functions, Introduction to Strings, Defining a String, String Manipulation Functions, Copying One String Into Another, Comparing Strings Functions, Working With Individual Characters, Working With Sub-Strings, Working With Character Cases, Formatting Strings.

Pointers and Functions
Learn: Reviewing Functions, Declaring a Pointer to Function, Using a Pointer to Function, A Pointer to a Function as Argument, Passing a Function as Argument, An Array of (Pointers to) Functions, Using an Array of Functions and more.

Arrays and Pointers
Learn: Relating a Pointer to an Array, A Pointer as Argument, Passing Pointers as Arguments, Passing Reference Pointers to Functions, Pointers and Multi-Dimensional Arrays, Dynamic Arrays Dynamic Multi-Dimensional Arrays, Pointers and Arrays With Functions, Single Dimensional Arrays and Functions and more.

Intermediate Operations
This tutorial covers the Bits Operators: Comparing Bits: The Bitwise NOT Operator, The Bitwise AND Operator, The Bitwise OR Operator, The Bitwise-Exclusive XOR Operator; Bit Shift Operators: The Left Shift, The Right Shift and more.

Constructing Expressions
There are techniques you can use to combine conditional statements when one of them cannot fully implement the desired behavior.

Logical Comparisons
A program is a series of instructions that ask the computer to check some situations and to act accordingly. To check such situations, the computer spends a great deal of its time performing comparisons between values. A comparison is a Boolean operation that produces a true or a false result, depending on the values on which the comparison is performed. A comparison is performed between two values of the same type; for example, you can compare two numbers, two characters, or the names of two cities.

C++ Projects and Linkage
A computer application is primarily a series of files put together to compose a single entity. With previous generations of programming, you had to create text files, save them with a .c, a .cc, or a .cpp extension, link them and compile them. Many modern programming environments allow you to create the files and hand them to the compiler that would link them as a project, and then create an executable. In reality, the process has not changed, it has only been made easier and faster. Still, because the programming environments are developed by different companies, each presents its own way of creating the necessary files, compiling them, and creating an executable.

Exploring Functions
When a function receives an argument, it performs one of two actions with regards to the value of the argument; it might modify the value itself or only use the argument to modify another argument or another of its own variables. If you know that the function is not supposed to alter the value of an argument, you should let the compiler know. This is a safeguard that serves at least two purposes. First, the compiler will make sure that the argument supplied stays intact; if the function tries to modify the argument, the compiler would throw an error, letting you know that an undesired operation took place. Second, this speeds up execution.

Introduction to Functions
A function is an assignment or a task that must be performed to complement the other part of a program. There are two kinds of functions: those supplied to you and those you will be writing. The functions that are supplied to you are usually in three categories: those built-in the operating system, those written in C++ and those supplied with your programming environment. The use of these functions is the same regardless of the means you get them; you should know what a function looks like, how to create one, what functions are already available, where they are located, and what a particular function does, how and when to use it.

Operators and Operands
An operation is an action performed on one or more values either to modify the value held by one or both of the variables or to produce a new value by combining variables. Therefore, an operation is performed using at least one symbol and one value. The symbol used in an operation is called an operator. A variable or a value involved in an operation is called an operand.

C++ Support for Code Writing
We have been introduced to declaring variables using specific data types. After declaring a value and initializing it, you may want the value to change type without redefining it. This is required in some cases where you already have a value, probably produced by one variable, while another variable declared with a different data type. This means that you would need to convert a value from one type into another type. For example, you may have declared a variable using a double data type but you need the value of that variable to be used as an int. Transferring a value from one type to another is referred to as casting.