Exploring C++ The Programmers Introduction to C++



Aress | ISBN-10: 1-59059-749-4 | English | PDF | 704 Pages | 2.30 MB |

Introduction
Hi, there. Thank you for reading my book, Exploring C++. My name is Ray, and I’ll be your author today. And tomorrow. And the day after that. We’ll be together for quite a while, so why don’t you pull up a chair and get comfortable. My job is to help you learn C++. To do that, I have written a series of lessons, called explorations. Each exploration is an interactive exercise that helps you learn C++ one step at a time. Your job is to complete the explorations, and in so doing, learn C++. No doubt you have already leafed through the book a little bit. If not, do so now. Notice that this book is different from most books. Most programming books are little more than written lectures. The author tells you stuff and expects you to read the stuff, learn it, and understand it.
This book is different. I don’t see much point in lecturing at you. That’s not how people learn best. You learn programming by reading, modifying, and writing programs. To that end, I’ve organized this book so that you spend as much time as possible reading, modifying, and writing programs.

How to Use This Book
Each exploration in this book is a mixture of text and interactive exercises. The exercises are unlike anything you’ve seen in other books. Instead of multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, or simple Q&A exercises, my lessons are interactive explorations of key C++ features. Early in the book, I will give you complete programs to work with. As you learn more C++, you will modify and extend programs. Pretty soon, you will write entire programs on your own. By “interactive,” I mean that I ask questions and you answer them. I do my best to respond to your answers throughout the lesson text. It sounds crazy, but by answering the questions, you will be learning C++. To help ensure you answer the questions, I leave space in this book for you to write your answers. I’m giving you permission to write in this book (unless you are borrowing the book from a library or friend). In fact, I encourage you to write all your answers in the book. Only by answering the questions will you learn the material properly. Sometimes, the questions have no right answer. I pose the question to make you ponder it, perhaps to look at a familiar topic from a new perspective. Other times, the question has an unambiguous, correct answer. I always give the answer in the subsequent text, so don’t skip ahead! Write your answer before you continue reading. Then and only then can you check your answer. Some questions are tricky or require information that I have not yet presented. In such cases, I expect your answer to be wrong, but that’s okay. Don’t worry. I won’t be grading you. (If you are using this book as part of a formal class, your teacher should grade this book’s exercises solely on whether you complete them, and never on whether your answer was correct. The teacher will have other exercises, quizzes, and tests to assess your progress inthe class.) And no fair looking ahead and writing down the “correct” answer. You don’t learn anything that way.

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