Ahoy hoy, am in ma second year of my engineering degree and am learning c++. I was wondering if there were any books or resources that you guys found useful when learning the language. Last year learned java, but was a case of just learning syntax and not really doing any problem solving stuff. Think one of my problems is that I understand things but just struggle when it comes to actually appliying it.

Any advice on c++ or just programming in general would be really appriciated, as I would really like to have a better understanding of it rather than just passing a class..

Peace
Kungu

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Yes there are load of books, maybe though it would be easier to use MSDN.com as a reference. I believe with C++ the trick is to learn the framework as it is in c#. C++ uses MFC Microsoft Foundation Classes. Or a opensource equivalent. Either way learnt he framework.

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Don't worry Sony, I'll just cancel my date of birth and get a new one.

just swollow chadk

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Next you'll be saying that M$ invented it.....

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So you mean you have very little actual programming experience to go on, but covered the theory in the class instead?

Your uni library is your friend. Find out what books they've got for C++ for beginners or whatever. The course should include a "recommended reading material" section which may be helpful - otherwise talk to your tutor. I still consult my tutor when I am looking for books in certain areas - they've probably read most of them whilst researching their course material.

After that, I'd advise covering the basics in C++ - what makes it different from Java (no garbage collection, so have to manually do things, whether passes by ref or value etc), then I'd personally get a load of programs I did or know how they work in Java, and convert it to C++.

I would imagine your course will actually involve this to get you into C++ as well, and not just go "Right, now it's C++ and you're all pro's - go write a program to do x,y and z!"

I'd never go that far, but they did make it popular. And i did mention open source. Oh and C# rules.

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Don't worry Sony, I'll just cancel my date of birth and get a new one.

Oh my god, what are you needing to learn C++ for, from what I remember of it is a very difficult language to learn (been years since I cracked open a book). But I'm sorry to say that from what I remember of it you are going to be spending a lot of time pulling your hair out trying to find a simple syntax error.

But yea, my advice find a very basic beginners book. and start from there, at least you have a fundamental grasp of programming (like classes, inheritance, functions, variables) so that would help and you would probably be able to just skim the first few chapters.

I just don't understand why these types of courses force you to start doing projects in C++, since you should be able to do them in java. Though personally I don't like java, I'm more of a "python" man myself, you actually start tackling the problem more than the language itself.

Software wise all you need is a text editor and a complier, but having syntax highlighting and error checking would help a lot for you (though even vi can handle sytax highlighting). I can't personally recommend an editor as I haven't programmed in that language for a while (and I've forgotten most of what I learned) but you might want to take a look at Eclipse it's free, can run on most os's, and can deal with a number of languages. Of course if you have access to the Microsoft Programming Suite then use that.

One piece of advice I can give is to create a rough program using python, or java if you don't want to bother learning a new language, "python" although is very easy to learn, and then once you have it basically working you can translate it into C, this will save you a lot of time since you wont be trying to battle the problem and the language at the same time.

PS: This post took me a while to actually get posted it kept coming up with the error:
turns out it didn't like the word "python" in a couple of places (hence the quotes around it), but it was happy with it in other places. Very, very weird.
Edit: (seems like it doesn't like it based on what comes after that word).

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But you'd need a mouth bigger than this!!

You never seen that guy slappy, him huge! he are ate all his m$ books and then forgot to crap out the stuff he no need!!!

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Eko, He never said eat chadk whole or in one go. Infact I believe making chad jerky and takaing a couple of year to consume him could be feasible.

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Don't worry Sony, I'll just cancel my date of birth and get a new one.

Hmmmmmmm sounds tastey, though I think a stew would be nicer! Heheh am having to learn it as part of my Electronic and Electrical Engineering course, its worth like 20 credits so really want to get it sorted. Thanks for the advice like, am gonna be raiding the library the morra on the look out for quite a few books hope they still have them. Will let you's know how i get on with it, wish me luck!

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For future reference, whenever your terms start - check out (if possible) online before hand the recommended reading texts (we usually have them in the module breakdown - what the module will cover, will also include links to course texts etc).

Then, before the first day, get into the library and take em all out on long loan

A very good book is 'The C++ Programming Language' by Stroustrup

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that will be the proxys reg ex`s stopping potential apache exploits , ie runniny "python" scripts

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