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C++ Workshop - Getting Started with C++ (Ch. 1 & 2)

Jeromy Walsh · 2008-05-18T16:41:20

Welcome to the GDNet C++ Workshop – Ch. 1 & 2For a complete introduction to this workshop, please look here. Workshop Overview This workshop is designed to aid people in their journey to learn beginning C++. This workshop is targeted at highly motivated individuals who are interested in learning C++ or who have attempted to learn C++ in the past, but found that without sufficient support and mentoring they were unable to connect all the pieces of this highly complex but powerful programming language. This is a 'guided' self-teaching C++ workshop. Each student is responsible for taking the time to read the material and learn the information. The community and tutors that arise out of this workshop are here for making the learning process run more smoothly, but are not obligated to baby-sit a person's progress. Because everyone will be working from the same textbook (Teach Yourself C++ in 21 days 5th Ed.), students may find it easier to get answers to the specific questions they might have. There is no minimum age requirement, and there is no previous programming experience required. Additionally, this workshop does not attempt to defend C++ as a language, nor does it attempt to demonstrate that C++ is either more or less useful then other programming languages for any particular purpose. People who intend to start a discussion about the differences between C++ and ANY other languages (except as are relevant to a particular discussion), are encouraged to do so elsewhere. This workshop is for educational, not philosophical discussions. Quizzes & Exercises Each chapter will have quizzes and exercises. Please try and answer them by yourself. If you try with reasonable effort but are unable to answer the questions or complete the exercises, feel free to post a clarification question here on the thread. Tutors, myself, or others will do the best we can to point you in the right direction for finding the answer. Chapter 1 – Getting Started, Chapter 2 – The Anatomy of a C++ ProgramIntroduction Greetings! Most weeks will be 7 days, beginning on Monday and ending on Sunday, however as this week starts on Thursday, and is the first “week” in the class, we will extend it to a full 10 days to get on a better schedule and give people a chance to obtain their textbooks in the mail. Additionally, as the topics are relatively straight forward, requiring little programming, etc…Week 1 will be a combination of the first 2 chapters. Chapter 1 is about 16 pages and chapter 2 is an additional 14 pages. Participants have 10 days ( ending Sunday, June 10th ) to read the first two chapters, at which point we will move on to the next chapter. Participants are welcome to post their questions for these chapters within this thread and myself, the tutors, and other participants will do the best we can to answer your questions. As the thread is likely to grow to a hundred or more posts, the C++ workshop threads will be closely moderated. Discussions which become narratives, flame-wars, or philosophical will either be removed or moved to another forum, unless entirely relevant to the current chapters. If you have trouble installing your compiler or getting “Hello World” to build, please ask for help. You will not be able to move forward with the workshop until you’ve done those two tasks successfully. Good Luck! Finally, feel free to post quiz-like questions after about 5 days. This will give people an opportunity to test their knowledge and understanding after they’ve had a chance to absorb the information. For questions which require further research then what is in the book, mark the question with an [Extra Credit] tag. Topical Outline of the Reading (Not literal due to copyrights) A History of C++ Which language should be learned first C or C++? How does C++ compare to Java and C#? An introduction to Managed C++ The ANSI Standard Getting in the right mindset to program How an .exe gets created Building your first program. – “Hello World” An introduction to compiler errors A review of Hello World An introduction to “Console Out” An introduction to the Standard Namespace Commenting your code An introduction to functions The difference between Methods and Functions Additional Resources None... Creating and Building a Project w/ VC++ .NET 2005It has come to my attention that the instructions for creating a project/file in the book on pages 19-20 are for Visual C++ 6. Visual C++ .NET 2005 is actually version 8. The correct approach for .NET 2005 is: Step 1: Create an empty project File->New->Project Select 'Win32' from Project types Select 'Win32 Console Application' from the Templates Type the name of the project and the location in the edit box near the bottom. Click OK When the dialog box appears click on "Application Settings" on the left Click "Empty Project" under Additional options. Click Finish Step 2: Add files to your project Right click on your project in the Solution Explorer Add->New Item Click Code in the Categories List Select either C++ File or Header File as appropriate to the task Type the name of the file in the edit box near the bottom. Click Add Building your executable For solutions which only have a single project, Build Solution will do the same as "Build <projName>". Once you have solutions which are containers for multiple projects, you will need to choose either to build individual projects, or the whole solution. I believe all of the tasks we will attempt in this workshop will require only a single project. As such, "Build Solution" should work just fine. Week 1 Errata Chapter 1, Exercise 1 says "...try to guess what it does without running it." If you DO put it into a compiler it will give you a compile error as the listing is not correct. The author meant: #include <iostream> int main() { int x = 5; int y = 7; std::cout << std::endl; std::cout << x + y << " " << x * y; std::cout << std::endl; return 0; } Note that 'endl' is also part of the Standard Namespace, and thus requires std:: at the beginning. [Edited by - jwalsh on May 30, 2007 5:25:07 PM]

CPP Workshop Workshops

Started by JWalsh June 01, 2006 11:40 AM

182 comments, last by Dbproguy 16 years, 1 month ago

Ninja87

122

June 02, 2006 04:46 AM

Hi Guys

I got an error when trying to run the debug

http://falconuk.co.uk/c++/error.jpg

just in case some one else gets this heres how to solve it

1, right click on the your project in solutions explorer
2, goto properties
3, under the "linker" list you see "debugging"
4, in the right pane window click generate degugging info and choose YES/DEBUG
5, ok this and your good to go

hope this helps

Ninja

Afr0m@n

100

June 02, 2006 05:35 AM

Hey guys! Haven't gotten started on the book yet, but one thing I notice is everyone's consequtive use of "std::endl". Is it possible to use "\n" for the same thing, only by including "<iostream>", or do I have to include "<iostream.h>" for this to work? I personally much prefer the use of "\n" instead of anything involving "endl" (and especially "std::endl"), because "\n" saves me time and space.

Thanks in advance!

_______________________Afr0Games

jflanglois

1,020

June 02, 2006 05:46 AM

Quote: Original post by Ninja87
Hi Guys

I got an error when trying to run the debug

http://falconuk.co.uk/c++/error.jpg

just in case some one else gets this heres how to solve it

1, right click on the your project in solutions explorer
2, goto properties
3, under the "linker" list you see "debugging"
4, in the right pane window click generate degugging info and choose YES/DEBUG
5, ok this and your good to go

hope this helps

Ninja

Yes, this is probably due to selecting "Empty Project" as the project type.

To jwalsh: I suggest you change the instructions for a new project to use "Win32 Console Application" instead. [edit] And select "Empty Project" in "Application Settings" in the dialog box that pops up.

jfl.

[Edited by - jflanglois on June 2, 2006 6:46:41 AM]

programwizard

100

June 02, 2006 06:00 AM

Quote: Original post by Afr0m@n
Hey guys! Haven't gotten started on the book yet, but one thing I notice is everyone's consequtive use of "std::endl". Is it possible to use "\n" for the same thing, only by including "<iostream>", or do I have to include "<iostream.h>" for this to work? I personally much prefer the use of "\n" instead of anything involving "endl" (and especially "std::endl"), because "\n" saves me time and space.

Thanks in advance!

You are free to use \n in place of endl:

cout<<"Hello, world!\n";

You still have to include iostream (never iostream.h) to get access to cout, though.

------------------------------Support the Blue Skies in Games Campaign!A blog... of sorts.As a general rule, if you don't have a general rule in your signature, you aren't as awesome as someone who does. General rules roxor teh big one one ones.

jflanglois

1,020

June 02, 2006 06:09 AM

Quote: Original post by Afr0m@n
Hey guys! Haven't gotten started on the book yet, but one thing I notice is everyone's consequtive use of "std::endl". Is it possible to use "\n" for the same thing, only by including "<iostream>", or do I have to include "<iostream.h>" for this to work? I personally much prefer the use of "\n" instead of anything involving "endl" (and especially "std::endl"), because "\n" saves me time and space.

Thanks in advance!

You can use '\n', but there is a reason for using std::endl. The reason is that std::endl will flush the stream if it is said to be buffered. A buffered stream is one that does not send your data directly to its destination. "Flushing" the stream is the act of actually sending the data to its destination. When you get to file streams, this will be important.

As for std::cout, I'm not entirely sure if it is required to be a buffered stream (it isn't as far as I can tell on WinXP/VC2005), but here's a basic rule of thumb: if you want to make sure your data gets to where its supposed to go when adding a new line, use std::endl. Otherwise, you can use '\n'.

jfl.

jflanglois

1,020

June 02, 2006 06:48 AM

Quote: Original post by _EpcH_
*** Source Snippet Removed ***

First of all I am using Visual Studio Standard Version (Just received it yesterday :) ). I created a standard Win32 Console Project (didn’t select the empty project option), and it comes with the main function as seen above.

My question is, What are the int argc and _TCHAR* argv[] parameters for ? Why do we need them?

Thanks,
Cheers!

Although Sr_Guapo has got it right, I must add that _tmain and _TCHAR are not standard. They exist to accomodate wide-character strings (wchar_t[]) as well as normal (MBCS) strings (char[]) and should not be used if writing cross-platform code.

You will find that the standard notation is like so:
int main( int argc, char *argv[] )

[edit] I should also mention usage of underscores (_) in identifiers.
The standard says:

Quote: From here
Each name that contains a double underscore ("__") or begins with an underscore followed by an uppercase letter (lex.key) is reserved to the implementation for any use.
Each name that begins with an underscore is reserved to the implementation for use as a name in the global namespace. [as well as in the std namespace]

This means that: (1) to be on the safe side, do not use leading underscores ([opinion] followed by a lowercase letter or not [/opinion]) or double underscores in your identifiers (e.g. int _myint;) (2) do not expect an identifier with a leading underscore or double underscores to have the same behavior on different platforms (case in point: _tmain and _TCHAR)

jfl.

[Edited by - jflanglois on June 2, 2006 9:48:50 AM]

Emmanuel Deloget

1,382

June 02, 2006 07:04 AM

The new Cpp Workshop forum is waiting for this thread! Can one of you, cool moderators1, move the C++ WS threads into the newly created forum?

1: yeah, I know, I forgot to tell you that you are teh best!§!!!11one

-- Emmanuel D. [blog, in French] [blog, very bad googlized translation]

Yu Une

122

June 02, 2006 07:28 AM

hi all,

I've been using Open Watcom 1.5, if I'm behind I'm sorry took me a little while to figure it out but http://gravesworld.org/c++1.html :) havn't figured out how to debug :( tho I'll figured it out.

As to this:
#include <iostream>
int main()
{
int x = 5;
int y = 7;
std::cout << std::endl;
std::cout << x + y << " " << x * y;
std::cout << std::endl;
return 0;
}

Hmm.. my guess is that random numbers?

Kenoli

122

June 02, 2006 07:58 AM

Am I doing this right?
http://cma.zdnet.com/book/c++/index.htm

I started on this a long time ago. I got up to about day 6 and stopped for some unknown reason. Maybe I'll try again. :o

jflanglois

1,020

June 02, 2006 07:59 AM

Quote: Original post by Yu Une
hi all,

I've been using Open Watcom 1.5, if I'm behind I'm sorry took me a little while to figure it out but http://gravesworld.org/c++1.html :) havn't figured out how to debug :( tho I'll figured it out.

As to this:
#include <iostream>
int main()
{
int x = 5;
int y = 7;
std::cout << std::endl;
std::cout << x + y << " " << x * y;
std::cout << std::endl;
return 0;
}

Hmm.. my guess is that random numbers?

Why do you think that is so?

Also, I don't think you should be using Open Watcom. By their own admission, their STL implementation is incomplete, as well as having what they call an "old-style" (read: non-standard) IOStreams implementation. This will undoubtedly become a problem later in the book.

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C++ Workshop - Getting Started with C++ (Ch. 1 & 2)

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🎉 Celebrating 25 Years of GameDev.net! 🎉

C++ Workshop - Getting Started with C++ (Ch. 1 & 2)

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