I've been lurking this and the C++ board for about a month now. I am a "newbie" myself; 13 years of IT experience, accomplished at EDI and UNIX shell scripting, but new to C and C++.
What I'm seeing on these boards is frankly disturbing. There are a number of gurus... a number of honest students/learners trying to figure things out and actually LEARN the language(s)... and a distressing number of people (and I use that term creatively) posting messages like:
"HELP! I have an assignment that's due tomorrow to write a C program that uses structs and inverted virtual function parse thread tachyon inverter calls to add 1, 2 and 3... can someone show me how to do this really quick?"
Here's your answer in a nutshell (to borrow from ORA): FIGURE IT OUT! You're taking a class! Let me put it another way... those of you who post things like this, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE NEVER COME TO WORK WHERE I AM! I am so sick and tired of picking up the slack for people who won't do their own work. If you don't want to learn to program, DON'T TRY TO BECOME A PROGRAMMER!!!!! Be a politician or something.
There are some helpful folk here who will actually do it and post the code. I think this is well-meaning, but misguided. Think about it. What you're doing is allowing someone who may be incapable of actually doing the assignment to pass. You could be contributing to the creation of the next entry-level type to take your job... But there's something else amiss here, and that's the abject dishonesty of the whole thing. What's wrong with you that you actually hope and expect that someone else will do your work for you, and that you don't even see the problem in this?
I've been lurking these boards not to find fodder for criticizing, but to find answers as well. I've solved quite a few problems, and written a number of functional (but admittedly primitive) programs because of what I found here. Know how I found it? Scroll up... all the way up... see the button labelled search? Try it, it works! If you're taking a class, then you should know enough about what you need to do an effective search. Do one, and learn. In looking at the list of returns, you'll learn far more than you EVER will having someone change your diaper for you.
Stepping down from soapbox... ahem.
Thank you all for your time, and I apologize if this is so far off topic that it offends anyone, but it's just absurd. I guess maybe I'm just so old that I remember the concept called "cheating".
djp