5.3. Summary

By reading this chapter, you learned why you should design reusable code and how you should do it. You read about the philosophy of reuse, summarized as "write once, use often," and learned that reusable code should be both general purpose and easy to use. You also discovered that designing reusable code requires you to use abstraction, to structure your code appropriately, and to design good interfaces.

This chapter presented three specific tips for structuring your code: avoid combining unrelated or logically separate concepts, use templates for generic data structures and algorithms, and provide appropriate checks and safeguards.