C++ Crash Course

FOREWORD

“C++ is a complicated language.” This is a reputation C++ has earned across a number of decades of use, and not always for the right reasons. Often, this is used as a reason to disallow people from learning C++, or as a reason why a different programming language would be better. These arguments are hard to substantiate because the basic premise they rely on is wrong: C++ is not a complicated language. The biggest problem C++ has is its reputation, and the second biggest problem is the lack of high-quality educational materials for learning it.

The language itself has evolved over the past four decades from C. It started off as being a fork of C (with minor additions) and a pre-compiler called Cfront, which compiles early C++ code to ...