Best way to learn C++?

[Kaination]

Well, after all my time gawking at its amazement on what C++ can do, I've come to a conclusion.

Anyone know a good place to start learning how to code C++?

 

[DragonDude]

Pick up some books, check out the myriad websites offering articles and tutorials, look for school classes, and code. (Here's a good reference, and here's another) When you first start, just make little throwaway practice programs for yourself, to test doing everything you're learning. "Today I'm going to write a program that passes a pointer to a struct to a function, modifies a member of the instance, and prints it to the screen." That kinda thing. It's what I did when I was first learning, atleast. No matter how you practice, you just want to make sure you do. Don't just skim through chapters in a book, because chances are you're not going to remember it later on.

If you're learning it for the sake of game development (the most common reason people pick up computer programming, no doubt), there's many sites focusing on programming in context of game design as well. GameDev.net is one of the best of that kind.

 

[frsrblch]

If you want to code in C++, you'll need a compiler program. I would recommend one called CodeWarrior. I used it for my Computer Egineering course, and it's good. The text we used was C// Programming/code Warrior by Malik, but it goes for $120. It comes with the compiler, though. Look around for books and stuff, there's plenty of information out there.

This is the online resource that was recommended to us was http://www.cplusplus.com/. It has been a life saver when it came to my assignments.

C++ can do lots of interesting things, but the course I had to take was a pain. They expected us to understand way more than we really need to be able to code properly.

 

[Kasey]

Get a book from your local library. I saw one that told you all of the codes and came with a cd that had them compiled and had a compiler, quake 2 and other stuff. I think it was by michael morrison. I'm not positive though.

 

[frsrblch]

One of the neatest things I saw in this course was just how fast your computer actually goes. Here's one of the programs I made while trying to figure out a couple things. It can calculate all the prime numbers from 1 to 80 000 in a matter of seconds.

http://www.ualberta.ca/~fbalch/Prime%20Numbers.exe

It says it took my computer 12 seconds... how about everyone else?

Fear my mad C++ skills.

 

[Smith|]

One of the neatest things I saw in this course was just how fast your computer actually goes. Here's one of the programs I made while trying to figure out a couple things. It can calculate all the prime numbers from 1 to 80 000 in a matter of seconds.

http://www.ualberta.ca/~fbalch/Prime%20Numbers.exe

It says it took my computer 12 seconds... how about everyone else?

Fear my mad C++ skills.

8 seconds, here =P. Cool little program, though.

 

[|Overlord|]

7837 prime numbers found between 1 and 80000. This took 10 seconds.

 

[frsrblch]

Ran it at my dad's and it took 24 seconds. Ouch.