User talk:V2os

Understanding C++
I see you've decided that you'd like to contribute to the Understanding C++ book. I definitely want to encourage you to contribute and hope we can work together. To that end I'd like to inform you a little bit about the intention of the book. The book is intended to be for people who already know how to use a computer fairly well. Like how to navigate whatever OS they use, run programs, and know how to get new programs on there computer. So basic computer knowledge in other words.

What the book doesn't assume though is the reader know what programs consist of, how they do their work and why they would need to learn a language like C++ if they want to learn to make programs, which is what Understanding C++/Introduction is for. I think that might be similar in purpose to the Computer and Programming languages chapter. However the main difference is that I didn't think it would be helpful to people who've decided to learn C++ to be distracted by material about other programming languages.

The different programming paradigms wasn't really something I had thought about covering because I thought that could be distracting as well, and thought if they were to be covered at all they would be covered as the book progresses. Like functional programming might be touched a bit in the chapter on Functions.

You may have also noticed the focus is on standard C++ only, this is intended to keep this book very focused and helpful for beginners. I hope this book can made to be both fun to read and interesting to read at the same time. In my own experience with programming book, when they are not too dry, have a lot of illustrations and provide a lot of fun examples, I learned quicker, and that is what my hope is for this book too.

I saw what you said in the reading room and I do agree with most of it. I just don't think the C++ for dummies book is a good example to follow, because I like a lot of people that I'm aware of in the C++ community, don't think that book teaches how to use C++ correctly. I don't intend to have any specific size limit for this book, but I do know there are some well written C++ programming books that are less than 1,000 pages, and some poorly written C++ programming books over 1,000 pages, so to me size isn't a good measure or indicator of how good a book is. --dark lama  00:22, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

Oh also, I wouldn't mind discussing and throwing ideas around about how to approach teaching standard C++. I only have a few basic things in place that I'd like to keep. The Core section, which to me is intended for things like variables (which includes arrays and pointers), functions, classes, control flow, templates, exceptions, etc. with a taste of the standard library and other concepts important to C++ programming. The advance section for things like lists, trees, hash tables, basic ways to optimize program that don't depend on what compiler is used and the like, etc. The standard library section for understanding how to use everything in the standard library like string, map, stacks, queues, sets, etc. which hopefully by the time a person reads this section they will have already a pretty good grasp of how they work. Besides what each section of the book should contain I haven't really figured out yet where to begin with teaching C++, as can be seen by how basically the only thing present being an introductory to programming. --dark lama  00:48, 16 November 2008 (UTC)