Intermediate C++ Foundations

This unit develops intermediate C++ skills that bridge beginner syntax to robust application design for game programming. Students practice memory and pointer management, object-oriented design and patterns, debugging techniques, and standard-library features (streams, templates, lambdas, and common libraries) to prepare for higher-level systems and game-specific development in subsequent units.

Learning Objectives

• Apply memory management and pointer operations to create and manage dynamic data structures, implement constructors/destructors, and correctly allocate and free heap resources
• Demonstrate object-oriented design by encapsulating data, creating class hierarchies, implementing patterns (singleton, observer), and composing types to model game-related systems
• Analyze and resolve runtime and logic errors using debugger tools and advanced debugging techniques, inspect and modify program state, and implement exception handling and safe error recovery
• Evaluate and apply C++ standard and third-party library features — including streams, file and directory I/O, string parsing (tokenizers and hashes), templates, user-defined literals, lambdas, and Boost utilities — to format output and process data efficiently