Practical CMake for Modern C++: A Hands-On Guide To Building, Testing, And Deploying Robust, Cross-Platform Applications

Are you tired of wrestling with brittle Makefiles, being locked into a specific IDE, or spending hours trying to get a third-party library to build correctly? If you've ever felt that building your C++ code is more difficult than writing it, you are not alone. This book is your definitive guide to ending that frustration for good. This is not a dry reference manual. Instead, it's a practical, hands-on journey where you will build a complete C++ application from scratch. We'll start with a simple "Hello, World!" and, step-by-step, add all the features of a professional project: libraries, dependencies, unit tests, and a fully automated release pipeline. Along the way, you will master the modern, target-centric approach that makes CMake projects clean and maintainable. You will learn to confidently manage dependencies—whether by finding them on the system, fetching them from source, or using professional package managers like vcpkg and Conan. You will finally solve the "it works on my machine" problem with CMake Presets, getting a seamless experience in VS Code, Visual Studio, and CLion. By the end of this guide, you will have built a complete, cross-platform CI/CD pipeline with GitHub Actions that automatically builds, tests, and packages your software. Stop just compiling code. Start building and deploying professional C++ applications with confidence. View Less