Introduction

This book is designed to help you teach yourself how to program with C++. No one can learn a serious programming language in just three weeks, but each of the lessons in this book has been designed so that you can read the entire lesson in just a few hours on a single day.

In just 21 days, you’ll learn about such fundamentals as managing input and output, loops and arrays, object-oriented programming, templates, and creating C++ applications—all in well-structured and easy-to-follow lessons. Lessons provide sample listings—complete with sample output and an analysis of the code—to illustrate the topics of the day.

To help you become more proficient, each lesson ends with a set of common questions and answers, a quiz, and exercises. You can check your progress by examining the quiz and exercise answers provided in Appendix D, “Answers.”

Who Should Read This Book

You don’t need any previous experience in programming to learn C++ with this book. This book starts you from the beginning and teaches you both the language and the concepts involved with programming C++. You’ll find the numerous examples of syntax and detailed analysis of code an excellent guide as you begin your journey into this rewarding environment. Whether you are just beginning or already have some experience programming, you will find that this book’s clear organization makes learning C++ fast and easy.

Conventions Used in This Book

Tip

These boxes highlight information that can make your C++ programming more efficient and effective.

Note

These boxes provide additional information related to material you just read.

FAQ

What do FAQs do?

Answer: These Frequently Asked Questions provide greater insight into the use of the language and clarify potential areas of confusion.

Caution

These focus your attention on problems or side effects that can occur in specific situations.

These boxes provide clear definitions of essential terms.

This book uses various typefaces to help you distinguish C++ code from regular English. Actual C++ code is typeset in a special monospace font. Placeholders—words or characters temporarily used to represent the real words or characters you would type in code—are typeset in italic monospace. New or important terms are typeset in italic.

In the listings in this book, each real code line is numbered. If you see an unnumbered line in a listing, you’ll know that the unnumbered line is really a continuation of the preceding numbered code line (some code lines are too long for the width of the book). In this case, you should type the two lines as one; do not divide them.

Sample Code for This Book

The sample code described throughout this book and Appendix D, “Answers,” are available on the Sams website at http://www.samspublishing.com. Enter this book’s ISBN (without the hyphens) in the Search box and click Search. When the book’s title is displayed, click the title to go to a page where you can download the code and Appendix D.