API stands for Application Programming Interface. In the context of this course, you can consider the header files to be such interfaces, as they determine what class functions and properties are public and thus accessible from anywhere.

AddressSanitizer (ASAN) is a memory error detector for C/C++. In this course, the makefiles will typically compile an executable that uses ASAN, with "-asan" at the end of its name.

The two notable access specifiers are:

Constructor is a special non-static member function of a class that is used to initialize objects of its class type. A constructor is called upon initialization of an object. A constructor without arguments is a default constructor, but constructors that take arguments can be defined.

GDB, the GNU Project debugger, allows you to see what is going on `inside' another program while it executes -- or what another program was doing at the moment it crashed.

GDB can do four main kinds of things (plus other things in support of these) to help you catch bugs in the act:

GNU Make is a tool which controls the generation of executables and other non-source files of a program from the program's source files. Make gets its knowledge of how to build your program from a file called the makefile, which lists each of the non-source files and how to compute it from other files. When you write a program, you should write a makefile for it, so that it is possible to use Make to build and install the program.

Memory leak means that the program is not freeing up memory it reserves. The memory will be freed when the program terminates, but if a program keeps leaking more and more memory without terminating, it can become a huge issue!
A typical way for memory leaks to occur is reserving memory with new and not calling delete before the pointer goes out of scope.

Pointer variables store a memory address as their value. In other words, they point to some data. The data can be accessed by dereferencing the pointer. (Either like *p or p->...)

A recursive function calls itself from within it. The recursion call must be conditional or it would lead to an infinite loop.

Valgrind is another tool besides ASAN that you can use in this course. It can detect many memory-related errors that are common in C and C++ programs and that can lead to crashes and unpredictable behaviour.

const is a keyword meant to mark something as immutable

Using const improves code readability and prevents accidental modification of objects.

g++ is a C++ compiler that we primarily use for this course. It is the C++ compiler for the GNU compiler collection. You may sometimes see gcc being used instead of g++, which was originally the GNU C compiler, but calling gcc generally also compiles .cpp files as C++. However, calling g++ is preferred.

In C++, std stands for Standard Library, which is a collection of commonly useful classes and functions. Typically, these are defined in the std namespace.