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From: Joe Mason on 1 Aug 2010 12:16
I'm interested in learing C/C++. Would anyone be able to direct me to a
good resource for learning? I'm interested in developing both windows and
linux console applications. Also any advise that you would have on
compilers for windows native programs, 32 and 64 bit would be great. For
linux I plan on using the gnu compilers included in debian. Thanks for any
advise you may have.

Joe
From: Stuart Golodetz on 1 Aug 2010 12:58
Joe Mason wrote:
> I'm interested in learing C/C++. Would anyone be able to direct me to a
> good resource for learning? I'm interested in developing both windows
> and linux console applications. Also any advise that you would have on
> compilers for windows native programs, 32 and 64 bit would be great. For
> linux I plan on using the gnu compilers included in debian. Thanks for
> any advise you may have.
>
> Joe

A few suggestions :)

* Pick either C or C++ to learn first, and focus on that. Learn the
other one afterwards. If you try and learn both at the same time, it'll
make your life harder (and you run the risk of writing C++ like a C
programmer).

* For a compiler etc. on Windows, your best bet is probably Microsoft
Visual C++ Express (which is free). The IDE which comes with that is
pretty much the market leader as far as I'm aware (I haven't seen a
better one, at any rate). Don't be put off by the "C++" in the title --
it also compiles C.

* Since you want to write console applications on multiple platforms,
I'm guessing you're interested in portability? In that case, you might
well also be interested in cross-platform building -- one good choice
that I can recommend would be CMake (www.cmake.org), but there are
others. CMake itself will generate native project files on a variety of
platforms, e.g. it will generate Visual C++ projects, Unix makefiles,
XCode projects (on Mac), etc.

* In terms of actual learning resources, your best bet is probably to
work your way through a book (most online C++ tutorials aren't great
from what I've seen). The one I learnt C++ from was C++ Primer (which
was good). A few other good books to look at are (in no particular order):

Accelerated C++ (Koenig and Moo)
The C++ Programming Language (Stroustrup)
Effective C++ (Meyers)
More Effective C++ (Meyers)
Effective STL (Meyers)
Exceptional C++ (Sutter)
More Exceptional C++ (Sutter)
The C++ Standard Library (Josuttis)
C++ Templates: The Complete Guide (Vandevoorde and Josuttis)

You might want to check out some of the ACCU (Association of C and C++
Users) book reviews too actually:

http://accu.org/index.php/book_reviews

Hope that helps a bit!
Stu
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