As I'm spending some time back in the land of low-level C, I'm trying to fully get my head around best-practices for header files and code organization, so I thought I'd toss out some questions.

I wish that were the case. In C++ you need to expose all the members of your class including private members in the header file. So much for privacy… ...

};</pre>If you intend to use forward declarations for a class (especially a template) in a lot of places, it might be wise to put it in a separate header file and include that.