Learning c++?

Should I buy a book? Use free tutorials online? How about standard c++ vs Visual?

Learning c++?
my suggestion is get a c++ complier from the net ,then get access to some good website such as cprogramming.com or some good tutorial like





http://www.geocities.com/sstutor/





start by writing very basic programs.Once you are confident you can write them without checking the syntax again and again go for more advanced concepts,the tutorial website i mentioned about is excellent for beginners..








you can get the Boreland C++ compiler from this website





http://www.borland.com/downloads/downloa...
Reply:Hi there.





I would suggest both. Having a book is good as it will bring you the theory and knowledge you need so you could have an idea on how things work. Tutorials are good also as you may use them for additional examples and ideas you may not get in the book.





It is not good to limit yourself and rely on one source only as books alone may be theoretical only and will not give you too much practice and online tutorials may get too techie as most of them assume you have knowledge on the subject and you will not learn anything.





About Standard and Visual applications I would suggest for you to learn both as on standard you get the concepts and ideas and particularly you go straight to the point when you want something. Once you're ready there then learn visual, as sometimes visual tools are bugged and since visual environments are based on templates sometimes these are wrong and do not give you the desired results (happened to me before).





For both standard and visual tools you may get started with Trolltech's QT designer (this one is used commonly on both unixish and windows applications) and Borland's C++ standard compiler (it is basically QT's engine). The best of all is that both tools come as freeware versions so you don't need to pay for them unlike MS that costs hundreds of dollars.





Hope that helps.
Reply:Learn C first!!! Then learn C++. The only purpose for using visual studio is if you want to use the Microsoft foundation classes. That stuff lets you make graphical user interfaces. You can get free C++ compilers from GNU. Personal I think Unix tools are more powerful than microsofts IDE. I program windows stuff using cygwin. You should go to your community college to learn programming though.