C++ Primer - Week 1

First off, I unfortunately underestimated how long it would take me to finish chapter 2, so I just finished it today, but I believe I will still be able to finish this week goal.

Now on to what I have learned from the 1st and 2nd chapter.

The title of the 1st chapter was "Getting Started." It was a short chapter and went over a lot of what I already new, such as how programming works, commenting, and some input/output. The only thing of interest was preprocessor directives. I was a little rusty on them since I mainly only use them for including files. I ended up going on a tangent looking up how to split up your code into multiple source and header files.

The title of the 2nd chapter was "A tour of C++." It went over basic variables and memory allocation, which lead into Object-Based, Object-Oriented, Generic, Exception-Based Design, which in turn lead into namespaces and vectors. This chapter started out with things I was already familiar with such as variables and memory allocation, which only served to teach me how to allocate memory in C++, since I had only done it in C prior to starting this book. The design section in the middle was interesting enough, but dealt with a lot of code it only vaguely explained, constantly referring to chapters I had not read yet, which was slightly aggravating. I personally would have preferred to be taught the design principles in pseudo code, since it would have been easier to understand, and it might have gone over design principles in more detail (like flow charts). The namespaces and vectors sections were interesting though. I had never learned much about namespaces and vectors in any previous class, since I've mainly taken C classes.

Next I have to read chapter 3 and 4 (113 pages altogether), which are titled "The C++ Data Types" and "Expressions" respectively. I hope to get through these chapters by this Saturday and get back on track with my schedule.

EDIT: Add page breaks 7/8/11