Thread: Public

Lol, hardly everything. I've been doing C++ for 12 years now, and I own a lot of books (the internet is a good resource, but you can't get the equivalent of a good 800 page book). Further, I try to keep up with Guru of the Week and other writings of experts like Sutter.

http://www.gotw.ca/ is the official homepage.

He also made 60some of those articles into two books (with revised, updated, and expanded solutions), Exceptional C++ and More Exceptional C++.

I agree with almost everything he has said in those articles, the one exception being his case-insensitive string class. There are better ways to accomplish his goal without creating a new type of string, and it doesn't make sense to make your string responsible for how compares work; it should be the job of a custom comparison function. I think Matt Austern has a better solution (on the web somewhere) although it should be templatized so that it can handle wide strings as well (I have done this).

A long hobby which will help my career. I'm actually still in college (Ph.D. student), I've been programming C since I was 10 and C++ since 11. I chose not to go into computer science, preferring engineering -- I like building electronic hardware -- but I also program quite a lot, as often the projects I work on lack critical development tools (or I didn't have access to any). One recent example I worked on was a PCMCIA card. PCMCIA cards have a ROM on the chip that holds information about the card (CIS). Now, with the PCMCIA specification, I could have simply gone and written the CIS in hex by hand, but that would be a royal pain, so I made a simple GUI to add and remove properties from a file, and it would create the image I needed to flash the ROM.

I've taken plenty of CS courses, I've had to write code in languages ranging from Java at the high-level side to machine code (written using a hex editor) at the low level side. CS seems like a perfectly good major; I practically did major in it for the number of courses I took.

Having done some job interviewing, my programming experience was widely talked about and was seen as a positive thing by my would-be recruiters, so it's good to have, even if it's not your career.

Oh, another good site: http://www.cuj.com.

It's always a good idea to have them, no matter what.

And the real question becomes, what do YOU want to do? I can tell you what I did with my life, what choices I made, what motivates me, but that's irrelevant. What motivates you? What do YOU want?

If you don't know, based on your stated interests, I think you might want to start out with a double major in electrical engineering and computer science. The two overlap in about 75% of their curriculum anyway, so it's easy. And if you find you really only want one or the other, change majors.

Just a note, are we talking about linkage internal, external or scope. Isn't Public an access modifer that controls scope? Static variables persist for the length of a program. External variables (which are static) have external linkage and file scope(global) are known to all files of a program. If you want to limit scope to only functions within a single file it must be declared as extern static.

Correct me if I am missing somthing or am way off base.

Code:

//main.h
#ifndef mainHeader
#define mainHeader

int main();
LRESULT CALLBACK WndProc();

#endif

So you use the #ifndef and the rest in the header that's included multiple times ? And what's your LRESULT CALLBACK in main() ?

Alright thanks, that helped.