Programming Languages and Systems

C++ is a large and complicated language. People get lost in details. However, to write good C++ you only need to understand a few fundamental techniques – the rest is indeed details. This paper presents fundamental examples and explains the principles behind them. Among the issues touched upon are type safety, resource management, compile-time computation, errorhandling, concurrency, performance, object-oriented programming, and generic programming. The presentation relies on and introduces a few features from the recent ISO C++ standard, C++11, that simplify the discussion of C++ fundamentals and modern style.