7.13. Wrap-Up

This chapter began our introduction to data structures, exploring the use of arrays and vectors to store data in and retrieve data from lists and tables of values. We showed how to declare, initialize and refer to individual elements of an array. We also illustrated how to pass arrays to functions and how to use the const qualifier. We presented basic searching and sorting techniques. You saw how to declare and manipulate multidimensional arrays. Finally, we demonstrated C++ Standard Library class template vector, which provides a more robust alternative to arrays.

We continue our coverage of data structures in Chapter 14, Templates, where we build a stack class template. Chapter 20, Standard Template Library (STL), introduces several of the C++ Standard Library's predefined data structures, which you can use instead of building your own. Chapter 20 presents more of class template vector and discusses additional data structure classes, including list and deque—array-like data structures that can grow and shrink in response to a program's changing storage requirements.

We have now introduced the basic concepts of classes, objects, control statements, functions and arrays. In Chapter 8, we present one of C++'s most powerful features—the pointer. Pointers keep track of where data and functions are stored in memory, which allows us to manipulate those items in interesting ways. After introducing basic pointer concepts, we examine in detail the close relationship among arrays, pointers and strings.