C++ Primer Plus

cin and cout: A Touch of Class

You’ve seen enough of cin and cout to justify your exposure to a little object lore. In particular, in this section you’ll learn more about the notion of classes. As Chapter 1 outlined briefly, classes are one of the core concepts for object-oriented programming (OOP) in C++.

A class is a data type the user defines. To define a class, you describe what sort of information it can represent and what sort of actions you can perform with that data. A class bears the same relationship to an object that a type does to a variable. That is, a class definition describes a data form and how it can be used, whereas an object is an entity created according to the data form specification. Or, in noncomputer terms, if a class ...