Thread: How do I master C++ ?

How long did it take you to master it ?

O_o

I'll let you know when I get there...

Soma

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Accelerated C++
The C++ Standard Library
Effective C++
More Effective C++
Effective STL
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How do you master it? Well, if I knew that answer, I'd probably have mastered it long ago.
Jokes aside, the way you do it is as with every other language (hint: what whiteflags said)-

I've been doing C++ at my job, more-or-less full-time, for the last 8 years, and I'd say I'm far from being a "master," as you put it. I try to learn something new every day, and rarely miss that goal. Much of what I learn these days comes from reading posts on this forum, from veteran members such as Salem, Phantomotap, and Elysia. You'd be wise to read their responses to the various threads on this forum.

OpenGL is something you can start learning as soon as you feel comfortable with the language in general. Until you are completely comfortable with pointers, I wouldn't recommend working with any third-party library.

just about you think you got a good grip of things, the comitee releases a newer standard.. this cycle never ends (and it better not)!

one thing I do think many people are missing these days , is the low level memory managment - raw pointers, pointers to pointers, arrays and pointers, dynamic memory allocation etc.
many programmers think of this knowledge as C technics and therefor try to not tackle this knowledge directly
understanding this stuff (although you can always find a workaround) is a funamental step of understanding C++.

I've learned C++ for over a year, have read 2 of the books on Soma's list, and still suck :P. I don't think you can master "C++" because it's too nebulous and touches on too many things.

The best I try to shoot for is understanding enough of the language to be able to express concepts of the fields I'm interested in. Keep in mind a lot of the knowledge from those fields (graphics, GUI's, gaming, networking, ect) has nothing to do with the language itself. C++ is just a lens you can look through to view that knowledge.

Ideally I think you can learn OpenGL when you are comfortable enough with C++ that you can see through it to the concepts being expressed by OpenGL.

Originally Posted by Dave11

one thing I do think many people are missing these days , is the low level memory managment - raw pointers, pointers to pointers, arrays and pointers, dynamic memory allocation etc.
many programmers think of this knowledge as C technics and therefor try to not tackle this knowledge directly
understanding this stuff (although you can always find a workaround) is a funamental step of understanding C++.

Most of that stuff you don't need to worry about most of the time because it's low level, and things like that tend to be abstracted. Furthermore, C++ tends to offer a lot of high level tools, so you don't often need this stuff.
I would argue, however, that understanding pointers is important (yes, including raw pointers; but not necessarily for memory allocation, but for aliasing data between different data structures). Arrays are a given too. But again, neither of these is limited to low-level memory management. Low-level memory management is something you rarely have to do unless you're implementing time sensitive containers or algorithms. So no, I don't think they're fundamental to understanding C++, but yes, they are indeed part of the language and has their place. It really depends on where you want to focus your efforts.

I like to at least divide programming into two areas: systems programming, which usually entails constructing various high-level objects and piecing together these to form a system. You usually don't need low-level memory management here. Then there's the close to the metal area which is all about optimizing performance and memory. This is where you really need low-level memory management knowledge. This is the area where you need to know and use the low-level constructs. This is my experience, at least.

Originally Posted by MutantJohn

Like, what will happen when quantum computers happen? "Mastering" C++ will have fundamentally proved useless because it'll be a "dead" language.

Highly unlikely. For one, we don't know what quantum computing will even do to the world of computing. Then there's just the fact that there's tons of legacy code written in C/C++. That's not going away. IF, and I really emphasize the IF, C++ is going away, it's going to take at least 30+ years. That's a long time! And who is not to say that C++ will evolve with other languages to challenge the problem of quantum computing? We don't know, and we'll never know for sure until quantum computing hits. So that's a very big assumption.

Originally Posted by Alpo

I've learned C++ for over a year, have read 2 of the books on Soma's list, and still suck :P. I don't think you can master "C++" because it's too nebulous and touches on too many things.

You're not going to become "good" in a language if you've only studied it for a year. That's true of any language.