Title: On the C++ Programming Language: Readme
Author: Christian Neumüller

About this project

This tutorial aims to teach C++ as a first programming language. Read the introduction for more information.

This tutorial is written using Sphinx and ReStructuredText.

On the C++ Programming Language: Planned Outline

Introduction

• Meta
  • About this tutorial
    • Audience
    • Goals
  • Why C++
  • The ISO Standard
  • A tiny bit of history
• Hello World
  • Compiler basics
    • Info
    • How To: Installing MSVC/g++
  • The Hello World program
  • Using the command line compiler
• Resources [As in: books, links, ect.]

The Basics: Procedural programming

• Types, Expressions, Variables [hard!]
• Branching (if/else, switch)
• Loops (while, do…while, for)
• Functions [potentially hard!]
  • Pass by reference
• Arrays with std::vector
• Defining new types: typedef/using, enum, struct
• (Raw) Pointers
• The heap and unique_ptr
• Characters, Strings, string literals, std::string

The C/C++ “Module-System”

• Translation Units, Headers, Linkage and the Linker
• Namespaces
• Example: Linked lists, stacks, queues
• A cross-platform build-system: CMake
• Using a library: SDL [good running example]
  • Note to reader: You can't start here!

Object Orientation

• OO Principles

• Struct/incomplete-type based OO

• Classes and access control (“visibility”)

• Value semantics: The big three

  • RAII [SDL has many potential usages]

• Inheritance and virtual functions

• Interface idiom and a word about multiple inheritance

• Linked lists, object oriented edition

  • Iterators

• Interlude: Error handling and exceptions

  • Return values
  • Exceptions
  • signals?

Introduction to Generic programming

• Template basics
• Function overloading
• Linked lists, generic edition & std::list

Solving old myths

• Operator overloading: Demystifying std::cout
• While we are at it: More on IO
• Low Level Heap Management
  • new and delete
  • RAII: Implementing ScopedPointer
• Move-Semantics and std::unique_ptr
• Arrays and std::vector
  • … and std::array

Functional Programming

• Function Pointers, Functors, Lambdas, std::function
• Higher order functions [Ex.: STL algorithms]
• Functional programming and OO

Containers & algorithms (“STL”)

• Concepts
• Containers
• Associative containers
• Algorithms

Missing/further interesting topics

• Test driven development
• Template Meta Programming (TMP)
  • Advanced template features
  • Faculty example
  • Tag dispatching
• Important libraries
  • boost
  • Qt?
• Network programming
• Multithreading
• Scripting: Lua