C++ Beginners Guide Introduction. This guide intended to serve two purposes. It is a revision guide for me; however, I hope others appreciate an alternative approach to most C++ guides. In the last semester of my degree course, I have introduced to C++. Before starting the course, I assumed I would really enjoy C++ as a language. While my initial assumption was correct, I struggled to follow many of the references and tutorials available. Primarily the cause of my struggles has been the naming of variables. Most examples found for C++ abbreviate heavily; often, the names are reduced to a single character. Good examples of this built directly into C++ are :
- cin
- cout
I spent a few weeks fighting to remember these. Then someone read them as “Console In” and “Console Out”. While this may seem obvious, my mind had not made the connection between the character “c” and “console”. There are many examples of tutorials in C++ doing very similar things. There are times when abstraction is absolutely required, but it doesn’t help the learning process for someone who struggles with abbreviations.
C++ Beginners Guide – Why C++?
C++ is a system language that has its roots in pure C. A program is not written in C++ for ease of use; rather, it is written to be quick. Like all languages, there are trade-offs between the size of the compiled code and speed of execution; however, if it is not meant to be highly performant, then using C++ is probably the wrong language choice. All versions of C++ maintain backwards compatibility with previous versions, and with C. Consequently, there are multiple ways of doing some operations. While this is useful in the language, using guides is difficult until recognising them is second nature. C++ is also a compiled language, which means its binaries are never cross-platform compatible. This differs from interpreted languages such as C# where binaries are frequently portable.
C++ History
Many guides on the history of C++ exist already, probably the best starting point to find other references for this is the C++ page on Wikipedia.
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