While defensive design involves planning for contingencies that might occur in a software development life cycle, defensive programming entails writing code such that it continues to function predictably in the presence of unforeseen circumstances. Through this course, explore the role of defensive programming and defensive design and the implementation of a defensive barrier in your code. You'll investigate various error reporting techniques, recognize scenarios for implementing a technique rather than exceptions, and distinguish between using exceptions and assertions to raise errors. The course will also help you discover how to use preconditions to check for inputs to your code and postconditions to verify the final results returned by your code. At the end of this course, you will have the skills and ability to follow a defensive approach to your software development and use exceptions and assertions to flag preconditions and check for postconditions.

Design by contract (DbC) involves two parties, a client and a supplier, collaborating based on mutual obligations and benefits. DbC was intended to be released as a part of the C++ language in C++20, but will now be part of the C++23 release. Use this course to examine the technical specifications of design by contract and the role of its key components - preconditions, invariants, and postconditions. You'll explore the most important features released in C++20, including the ranges library, coroutines, concepts, and modules. You'll also discover the weaknesses in defensive programming and when to implement offensive programming techniques in your code. When you are finished with this course, you will be able to tackle complex projects built using C++ and write code for them using software engineering principles and defensive programming techniques.

Modern C++ offers the use of smart pointers in the C++ standard library, which uses the resource allocation is initialization (RAII) technique to free programmers from the burden of resource management. Take this course to discover the various pitfalls involved in manually managing memory on the free store in C++. Through this course, you'll explore how to automate the management of resources that need to be explicitly acquired and reduce resource management issues through the RAII technique. When you are finished with this course, you should be able to manage memory and other resources in your C++ code using smart pointers from the standard library.

Using high-quality code in any programming language involves writing code that is clear, comprehensible, and maintainable. This means that your code needs to follow sound software engineering principles, and it is also important to know and deal with the different kinds of errors that might occur in code. Use this course to explore key principles of software engineering and learn how the preprocessor, compiler, and linker come together to build your C++ executable. You will also examine different kinds of errors in code, including compiler, linker, runtime, and logic errors. When you are finished with this course, you will have the skills and ability to implement software engineering principles to write clean and comprehensible code.

Writing good, robust, and maintainable C++ code involves understanding the intricacies of the language and avoiding common pitfalls. Use this course to learn more about avoiding fatal coding errors, adopting defensive coding techniques, and following best practices and other code niceties Examine some common coding errors, the correct way to set up constructors in code, and the pitfalls of overriding non-virtual functions. You will also explore object slicing errors, how to cast objects to other types, and the use of smart pointers to manage resources in C++. Finally, you will understand the implications of the static initialization order fiasco in C++ and how you can avoid it. At the end of this course, you will have the knowledge and skills to write robust, defensive C++ code.