After a complete review of basic class construction, more advanced features of classes are covered. All of the various operator overloaded functions are covered in depth. Principles of inheritance are presented along with virtual functions and the need for them. Examples clearly illustrate their usage. Abstract base classes and pure virtual functions come next.

C++ error handling, dynamic casting and run time type identification are shown. How "out of memory" errors are caught is discussed in depth, since Microsoft's VC 7 new function now no longer returns 0 when short of memory. The design of a hierarchy of exception classes is presented showing how an application can fully utilize the C++ error handling mechanism. Also, how to replace the new and delete functions, replacing the terminate and unexpected error handlers is shown.

Templates are covered in depth followed by an example of converting the double linked list into a template class as well as how the client programs are written.

A thorough discussion of binary files and hashing techniques illustrates direct file processing techniques including the relative record number method, the remainder method and ISAM (Indexed Sequential Access Method). How to write master file update programs is discussed. The need for hashing techniques is shown and various methods of hashing are presented.

Trees are discussed in depth next, including notation and needed functions and tree operations, such as inserting a new node and deleting a node. The chapter on sorting algorithms presents five different methods in detail. It also implements a benchmark program you can use for comparison purposes. B-trees and their variations are covered and there is a complete implementation of an AVL tree.

Graphs, priority queues and heaps are shown in detail. Network operations are also shown. Sets and maps are discussed. Set implementations include the set as an array and the set as a bit vector. The STL (Standard Template Library) is introduced. How instances are created and used are discussed. The last chapter presents the theory of complex program analysis and included the big-O notation.