Structure of This Book
This book is divided into two interleaved sections that cover the
language and the library, and a section of appendixes. Roughly speaking,
the language is the part of C++ that does not require any additional
#include headers or files. The
library is the part of C++ that is declared in the standard
headers.
Chapter 1-Chapter 7, Chapter 11, and Chapter 12 cover the language. The first seven chapters form the main language reference, organized by topic. It is customary for a programming reference to contain a formal grammar, and this book does so in Chapter 12, which is organized alphabetically by keyword (with some additional entries for major syntactic categories, such as expressions). Chapter 11 is a reference for the preprocessor.
Chapter 13 is the library reference, organized alphabetically by header. Chapter 8-Chapter 10 present an overview of the library and introduce the topics that span individual headers.
Sometimes, information is duplicated, especially in Chapter 12. My goal has been to present information when you need it, where you need it. I tried to balance the need for a single, clear, complete description of each language feature with the desire to reduce the number of cross references you must chase before you can understand that language feature.
Here are more detailed descriptions of each chapter.
Chapter 1 describes the basic rules for the C++ language: character sets, tokens, literals, and so on.
Chapter 2 describes how objects, types, and namespaces ...