After reading Bjarne's Stroustrop's (however you spell his name) book on C++ I realize something.
I have been programming in a mixture of C/C++, mostly C. The first few chapters of that book absolutely blew me away. He was using the iostream and other stream based libraries, templates, and other things I've never used or seen . Most source code that I've seen on the internet and here as well are really a mix of C/C++. I have looked at the stream libraries and standard class libraries before and knew they existed, but did not pay much attention to them. My references in the help file for my compiler did not explain these classes very well at all - probably because it is not their job to do so. Because of this I shyed away from using them.
Anyways, the book is absolutely awesome and it explains exactly how C++ works from the inside out and gives good advice at the end of each chapter on thing to do and things you shouldnt do. This advice has helped me a great deal. I have d/l ANSI C++ professional guidelines and standards which has also helped.
Hopefully after reading and understanding this book (Bjarne can write some pretty hard to understand code) my C++ coding style and use of the language will have improved significantly.
I'm also trying to port my new found C++ ability to my Windows programming, but yet I find that Windows keeps referring to/using primitive/older constructs from the C language. So it has been kind of hard to use pure C++ in a Windows program w/o using a third-party class library. Now I almost shudder at using an array in a C++ program whereas before I never knew to do different. Thanks to the class libraries most containers have already been coded for me and are much more versatile since they do not rely on one data type.
I realize that to take one book as 'the only way' to do things is not the correct approach. However, since the author helped design the language and has forgotten more about C++ than I've ever known - if he says something is bad style (and he gives technical reasons when he does) I'm gonna heed his advice.
Again thanks to the individual on the board who has posted his FTP site that has E-books on it. Hope you don't mind, but I leeched about every book off of it.
Since then I've found more and more e-books in PDF and other formats. My total computer programming e-book count is close to 50 books in 3 days.
Thank you so much for opening my eyes to yet another vast resource of information available on the internet.
