Effective usage of Classes

As long as I have been programming (not very long) I have not used classes because I have yet to find effective ways to use them. Mostly because I don't know what sort of situations they would be best for. I use functions a lot in my code, since they seem to do the job fast and well.

Well, to the point, could anyone either give examples or suggest times when they are more useful. All the examples I have seen say mammal and dog and cat and car and stuff, nothing I can relate them to. I know how to use inhertance, so that may make the examples more easy to come by.

Thank you

Heres a usefull class.

Code:

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class IrcBot
{
    public:
        IrcBot();
        void Login();
        void Process();
        void HandleRecv(const std::string &toRecv);
        void Set_Socket(const SOCKET &sock);
        bool isOper(const std::string &recvd);
    private:
        void loadOps();
        void loadNick();
        void splitRecv(std::string &recv, std::string &whoSent, std::string &msgSent, std::string &whatSent);
        std::string nick;
        SOCKET serverSocket;
        std::vector<std::string> ops;
};

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I tend to use classes whenever I have a group of functions that seem related to each other some way. For example, say you're writing a program to manage files of some description, you are likely to have a lot of functions that read & write etc, so you may find it makes your program more readable if you encapsulate them.