C++ Demystified(c) A Self-Teaching Guide

I strongly believe that the best way to learn programming is to write programs. The concepts covered by the chapters are illustrated by clearly and thoroughly explained code. You can run this code yourself, or use the code as the basis for writing further programs that expand on the covered concepts.

Chapter 1 gets you started. This chapter answers questions such as what is a computer program and what is a programming language. It then discusses the anatomy of a basic C++ program, including both the code you see and what happens under the hood, explaining how the preprocessor, compiler, and linker work together to translate your code into instructions the computer can understand. Finally, the chapter tells you how to use an integrated development environment (IDE) to create and run a project.

Being able to create and run a program that outputs Hello World! as in Chapter 1 is a good start. However, most programs require the storing of information of different types, such as numeric and text. Chapter 2 first explains the different types of computer memory, including random access memory, or RAM. The chapter then discusses addresses, which identify where data is stored in RAM, and bytes, the unit of value for the amount of space required to store information. Because information comes in different forms, this chapter next discusses the different data types for whole numbers, floating point numbers and text.

The featured star of Chapter 3 is the variable, which not only reserves the amount of memory necessary to store information, but also provides you with a name by which that information later may be retrieved. Because the purpose of a variable is to store a value, a variable without an assigned value is as pointless as a bank account without money. Therefore, this chapter explains how to assign a value to a variable, either at compile time using the assignment operator or at run time using the cin object and the stream extraction operator.

As a former professional chess player, I have marveled at the ability of chess computers to play world champions on even terms. The reason the chess computers have this ability is because they can calculate far more quickly and accurately than we can. Chapter 4 covers arithmetic operators, which we use in code to harness the computers calculating ability.

As programs become more sophisticated, they often branch in two or more directions based on whether a condition is true or false. For example, while a calculator program would use the arithmetic operators you learned about in Chapter 4, your program first would need to determine whether the user chose addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division before performing the indicated arithmetic operation. Chapters 5 and 6 introduce relational and logical operators, which are useful in determining a users choice, and the if and switch statements, used to direct the path the code will follow based on the user s choice.

When you were a child, your parents may have told you not to repeat yourself. However, sometimes your code needs to repeat itself. For example, if an application user enters invalid data, your code may continue to ask the user whether they want to retry or quit until the user either enters valid data or quits. The primary subject of Chapters 7 and 8 are loops, which are used to repeat code execution until a condition is no longer true. Chapter 7 starts with the for loop, and also introduces the increment and decrement operators, which are very useful when working with loops. Chapter 8 completes the discussion of loops with the while and do while loops .

Chapter 9 is about functions. A function is a block of one or more code statements. All of your C++ code that executes is written within functions. This chapter will explain why and how you should write your own functions. It first explains how to prototype and define a function, and then how to call the function. This chapter also explains how you use arguments to pass information from the calling function to a called function and a return value to pass information back from the called function to a calling function. Passing by value and by reference also are explained and distinguished. This chapter winds up explaining variable scope and lifetime, and both explaining and distinguishing local, static, and global variables .

Chapter 10 is about arrays. Unlike the variables covered previously in the book, which may hold only one value at a time, arrays may hold multiple values at one time. Additionally, arrays work very well with loops, which are covered in Chapters 7 and 8. This chapter also distinguishes character arrays from arrays of other data types. Finally, this chapter covers constants, which are similar to variables, but differ in that their initial value never changes while the program is running.

Chapter 11 is about pointers. The term pointers often strikes fear in the heart of a C++ student, but it shouldnt. As you learned back in Chapters 2 and 3, information is stored at addresses in memory. Pointers simply provide you with an efficient way to access those addresses. You also will learn in this chapter about the indirection operator and dereferencing as well as pointer arithmetic.

Most information, including user input, is in the form of character, C-string, and C++ string class data types. Chapter 12 shows you functions that are useful in working with these data types, including member functions of the cin object.

Information is stored in files so it will be available after the program ends. Chapter 13 teaches you about the file stream objects, fstream , ifstream , and ofstream , and how to use them and their member functions to open , read, write and close files.

Finally, to provide you with a strong basis to go to the next step after this introductory level book, Chapter 14 introduces you to OOP, Object-Oriented Programming, and two programming concepts heavily used in OOP, structures and classes.

A Quiz follows each chapter. Each quiz helps you confirm that you have absorbed the basics of the chapter. Unlike quizzes you took in school, you also have an answers appendix.

Similarly, this book concludes with a Final Exam in the first appendix, and the answers to that also found in the second appendix.