Panama Red posted:
I would like to learn to program in c++ on Linux and AIX
systems...mainl y socket and fifo type stuff. Can someone
recommend a book for someone with experience only with
Perl, shell, and Pick/Basic ?
Thanks
I started off with... uuuggghhh... Visual Basic, writing Windows programs.
That was about 5 years ago. I very quickly tired of that and then just
looked around and asked what's the best language. Having heard the arguments
for each, I quickly decided on C++. I've seen dozens of beginners books for
C++, but without a single doubt in my mind, _the_ best for _me_ was "C++ for
Dummies" by Steven R. Davis. I think the latest book is the 4th edition.
That book teaches you C++ pretty much inside out. After that, to really know
the language, all I did was go to the Microsoft MSDN site and view a list of
all of C++'s keywords. I clicked on the ones I didn't recognize, eg.
"explicit" "namespace" , and learned about them all.
Once you've done that, I recommend you learn about the structure of a C++
program, ie. source-code files, header files, object files, the compiler,
the linker.
After that, you will truly understand C++ and probably like it very much!
After that, you can move onto platform-specific programming, eg. Linux,
Windows.
I myself then moved on to Win32 programming. You use the Win32API, which is
just a bunch of functions, to create Windows and the like, eg.:
int main(void)
{
CreateWindow("H ello",blah blah blah);
return 0;
}
Microsoft has very much tried to hijack C++. For example, they tell you that
a Windows program starts at "WinMain" as opposed to "main". When actually,
what happens is that your program starts at some other function that then
does a load of stuff and then finally calls the "WinMain" function you
wrote. There's articles written about this, but you're a couple of months
away from that(if you choose to do Windows programming!).
First thing, I suggest "C++ for Dummies", the latest edition by Steven R.
Davis!
-JKop
