Part 1: Introduction to Programming with C++

The first part of this book is about foundations of programming with C++. As everybody knows, C++ is an object-oriented language. But what does this mean? Why is using an object-oriented programming language better than using a traditional non-object-oriented language? What should you pay attention to while programming so that you reap the benefits of object orientation? Often, people take the object-oriented approach for granted, and this reduces the effectiveness of its use.

The first chapter answers these questions. It is all about breaking the program into parts. A large program has to be written as a collection of relatively independent, but communicating and cooperating, components. If, however, you break apart what should be kept together, you introduce excessive communications and dependencies between parts of the program, and the code becomes more difficult to reuse and maintain. If you leave together, in the same component, what can and should be broken into separate pieces, you wind up with complex and confusing code which is—guess what—difficult to reuse and maintain.

There is no magic in using objects. Using them in and of themselves brings no benefits. However, thinking about your program in terms of objects helps you to avoid these two dangers: breaking apart what should belong together and keeping together what should be put into separate parts. Chapter 1, "Object-Oriented Approach: What's So Good About It?" discusses these issues—it shows which problems should be solved with the use of the object-oriented approach and how the object-oriented approach solves these problems.

Chapter 2, "Getting Started Quickly: A Brief Overview of C++," gives you a brief introduction to the language, including objects. The introduction is high level only. (You have to read other chapters of the book to see the details.) Nevertheless, this chapter covers enough to enable you to write simple C++ programs and prepares you for the detailed study of the strong and weak features of C++.

Other chapters in Part 1 present the basic non-object-oriented features of the language. According to the promise I made in Chapter 1, I pay particular attention to writing reusable and maintainable code. For each C++ construct, I explain how to use and how not to use it. Even though I do not discuss objects yet, the presentation becomes quite complex, especially in Chapter 6, "Memory Management: The Stack and The Heap." After all, C++ is a complex language. Skip topics that you find obscure and come back to them later, when you have more time to concentrate on coding details.