C++ Introduction

Full overview

IMPORTANT: Since Visual Studio for Mac no longer supports C++, this course is only suitable for students that have a Windows-based computer or virtual machine available to them.

Although this information isn’t essential to developing C++ programs, it does show how C++ works and how it compares to other languages.

Once you’ve installed an IDE and the C++ compiler, the quickest and best way to learn C++ programming is to do C++ programming. That’s why this chapter shows you how to write complete C++ programs that get input from a user, make calculations, and display output. When you finish this chapter, you should be able to write comparable programs of your own.

In chapter 2, you learned how to write programs that get input from a user, process that input, and display output to the user. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to write code so your program can make decisions. For example, it’s common to make decisions based on the input from a user. To do that, you’ll learn how to code control statements such as the if and switch statements.

In chapter 3, you learned how to code if and switch statements to make decisions. Now, this chapter shows how to code a statement known as a loop that allows you to repeat a block of statements multiple times. But first, this chapter presents some more skills for coding arithmetic expressions because these skills are often used when coding loops.

isn’t lost. To do that, you can use an output stream to write data from memory to a file. Then, you can use an input stream to read data from the file into memory. This is known as file input and output, or file I/O.

In chapter 2, you learned how to use two of the built-in, or fundamental, data types as you defined and initialized variables and coded assignment statements that used simple arithmetic expressions. In addition, you learned some basic skills for working with strings. Now, you’ll learn more skills that will let you work with fundamental data types at a professional level. In addition, you’ll learn more about working with strings, and you’ll be introduced to vectors, which allow you to store a sequence of values of any data type.

In this chapter, you’ll learn a variety of skills for declaring, defining, and calling functions. In addition, you’ll learn how to organize your functions into header files and namespaces. When you do that, you’ll be able to access these functions from multiple programs just as you can the functions in the C++ standard library.

As you develop a C++ program, you need to test it to make sure that it performs as expected. Then, if you encounter any problems, you need to debug the program to fix the problems. Finally, when you’re done testing and debugging a program, you need to deploy it so your users can run it.

This chapter begins by showing how to use a structure to group items of different data types into a single data type. Then, this chapter shows how to use an enumeration to group related constants. Both of these features make it easier to organize your code and work with related da

If you’re working in an embedded environment or with legacy code, you might not be able to use string objects as described in chapter 6. Instead, you can use an array of characters. This is known as a C string, or C-style string, because that’s how the C programming language works with strings.

In the old days of programming, handling errors was difficult because programming languages didn’t provide a standard way to check for errors, and they didn’t provide a standard way to communicate errors to other parts of the program that might need to know about them. To address this problem, most modern programming languages, including C++, provide exceptions. Exceptions allow you to write code that can handle errors more easily and reliably.

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