jesyspa / linear-cpp

An attempt at a C++ tutorial.

Linear C++

A C++ tutorial that can (hopefully?) be followed without jumping from chapter to chapter at every step.

Downloads:

• No project files
• Code::Blocks project files

Building

Via a bash shell, compiling all chapters:

for a in Chapter*; do g++ -std=c++11 -o "$a/out" "$a"/*.cpp; done

On OSX:

• You must install XCode and the Command Line Tools package. As of 9/04/2013, Mac OS X doesn't ship with a C++11 compiler.
• Then use clang to build:

for a in Chapter*; do clang++ --std=c++11 --stdlib=libc++ "$a"/*.cpp -o "$a"/out; done

Also, when compiling your own files on either of those two platforms, I recommend you add -Wall and -Wextra to your flags. Clang users may also want to add -fsanitize=undefined.

Markdown and EPUB

Thanks to @Gullumluvl it's possible to export these chapters as Markdown or epub files!

To do so, just run

./cpp_2_markdown.py Chapter\ NN*

where NN is the number of the chapter.

You can use

./cpp_2_markdown.py .

to build the whole book.

For building an epub, make sure you have pandoc and run

pandoc -M author=jesyspa \
  --standalone \
  -V 'header-includes="<style>pre > code.sourceCode {white-space: pre-wrap !important;}</style>"' \
  --toc --toc-depth=1 \
  -o linear-cpp.epub \
  ebook.md

The header-includes argument is needed to wrap long code lines.

Future plans

This project is discontinued. I don't plan to update it for new C++ standards or add any new language features.

Outline of what's coming missing:

• Practical Examples
• Variants, Optional
• Most of inheritance
• Scope
• Storage Duration
• Undefined Behaviour
• File IO
• Libraries: Boost, Abseil...
• Metaprogramming
• C++14 and up
• The preprocessor
• Most C features

So while I'm glad people have found it useful, please don't rely on this by itself to learn C++! It really only scratches the surface, and you'll do yourself a service if you get a good book.

linear-cpp's Issues

A converter into markdown/epub format

Hi,

not an issue, just a possible contribution.

This tutorial is just awesome, and I wanted to have it on my e-reader. Since you mention this in README:

Generating more human-readable files from the tutorials (or the other way around?)

I made a small script to turn it into markdown, then epub, it's here: github.com/Gullumluvl/cpp_2_markdown.git

Sorry, that was not written in C++ though...!

best

P.S: the formatting is already so neat that making it a clean markdown was way too easy.

Is #include <string> header in chapter 3 necessary?

Hi,

I just finished chapter 3 and I noticed my IDE has greyed out the header - #include - suggesting that it isn't necessary. The program appears to run fine with or without it.

I can't see anywhere std::string is used in the program. Is it being used somewhere I haven't noticed and my IDE thinks it is unnecessary because the header is implicit in - #include - or is this really not needed?

If std::string is used, is it considered good practice to make headers explicit, rather than implicit in C++?

std::cin.eof()

Hi,
I wasn't able to exit program in chapter 6, i keep typing numbers in the terminal but where end of file?

if(std::cin.eof()) {
break;
}

when it breaks?

What is a char?

With the proliferation (if I think of a word that sounds more like how a disease spreads, I'll edit this) of unicode, it's become pretty common for new languages to make allowances for unicode strings, or to use unicode strings natively. In both cases, a character is a pretty strange type--and often we're talking about something that is 16 or 32 bits wide. This isn't the case in C++. I actually don't know off the top of my head what a character in C++ is (I think it's an 8-bit value representing... ascii?), so I think that (for experienced programmers, anyway) it might be good to mention that in passing.

Error compiling on OS X Catalina

I'm getting this error when compiling using the suggested line for OS X.

Chapter 20 - Function Objects/builtin_operations.cpp:12:17: error: no member named 'accumulate' in namespace 'std'
    return std::accumulate(std::begin(args), std::end(args), 0);
           ~~~~~^
Chapter 20 - Function Objects/builtin_operations.cpp:24:17: error: no member named 'accumulate' in namespace 'std'
    return std::accumulate(std::begin(args), std::end(args), 1, std::multiplies<int>{});
           ~~~~~^
2 errors generated.