A BEGINNERS INTRODUCTION TO C++: HISTORY, BASIC PROGRAM STRUCTURE, LEARNING TIPS, AND RESOURCES

Ukeje Chukwuemeriwo Goodness
3 min readJul 10, 2021

Swagged Up Engineer

Like most engineering colleges, mine also has C++ added to our curriculum, and since I’ve been a C++ developer for close to a year now, I thought it’d be cool if I wrote an article on the language especially for those who think C++ and programming are uphill and only for the geeks.

C++ has been a household name in the tech space as one of the most popular and most used languages notable for its speed and object-oriented properties. C++ is a high-level language developed from the C programming language at Bell Labs by Bjarne Stroustrup in 1985. Today, used for the development of multipurpose high-performance applications. In some way, we all have interacted with programs written in C++. Here is a couple of cool stuff built using the C++ programming language

Photo from Cointelegraph

Thief System Shock 2 Thief II (Game)
Resident Evil 6 (Game)
Dogecoin (Cryptocurrency)
Bitcoin (Cryptocurrency)
Google Assistant (AI assistant)
Direct X (Game Engine)
Unity (Game Engine)

So, you’ve been interacting with C++-based programs without being aware.

Learning C++ is in no way, a waste of time as its applications are numerous. Popular Uses and implementations of the C++ programming language are.

USES OF C++

Game development
Blockchain development
Cybersecurity
Operating systems development
Robotics
Browser Development
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision
web browser development e.t.c

C++ is quite very powerful if you ask me and its diverse uses send the message.

WHERE TO LEARN C++

Here’s a couple of cool websites and youtube channels where you can learn to write and develop software with C++

Websites

Udemy.com

Skillshare.com

Sololearn.com (Recommended)

Programiz.com (Recommended)

Codecademy.com

Youtube Channels

Freecodecamp’s Channel

The Cherno (Recommended)

Apna College (Recommended)

The New Boston

The C++ DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT

Just like we write human languages on paper, C++ codes are written in an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) which is a computer program that contains a debugger, syntax editor, build tools, and a compiler that translates lines of code into machine code using an assembler. Popular C++ IDEs include

Codeblocks
Dev C++
Codelite
Jetbrains CLion (Recommended)
Microsoft Visual Studio

Some text editors like Sublime text, Visual studio code, and Atom also have good tools for C++ development.

A BASIC C++ PROGRAM (Outputting Hello World)

Here’s a pretty basic tutorial where I will be illustrating how to output the conventional text “Hello World”.

A program that Outputs Hello World in C++ looks like this

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main(){
cout << "Hello world";return 0;}

Here’s a line by line explanation

Line 1: #include is a preprocessor directive. It tells the compiler to include the C++ header files. iostream is the header file that contains the input and output functions. header file names are usually contained in the <>

Line 2: std here means standard. we are basically telling the compiler that we want to use everything in the C++ standard namespace (types, functions, variables)

Line 3: Every C++ program starts running from the main function. The braces signify the start and stop of the function

Line 4: Here we Output the text. cout which means console out is a function for output and the double less than symbol (<<) is called the stream insertion operator and is used for outputs.

NOTE: Every C++ line of code must end with a semicolon “;”

line 5: return 0 runs to show a successful code compilation

And there we have it, the most basic C++ program.

Knowledge of C++ opens the developer to a whole world of opportunities so have fun learning.

Ukeje Chukwuemeriwo Goodness
Ukeje Chukwuemeriwo Goodness

Written by Ukeje Chukwuemeriwo Goodness

Mechanical Engineering Student. Interested in Computational Sciences, Human Philosophy and Psychology.

Responses (3)

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Really informative presentation. Good job

A wonderful introduction
Thanks Chief 😊