December 2002
Beginner to intermediate
576 pages
14h 6m
English
Content preview from Practical C++ Programming, 2nd EditionBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 3. Style
There is no programming language, no matter how structured, that will prevent programmers from writing bad programs.
—L. Flon
It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.
—Stendhal
This chapter discusses how to use good programming style to create a simple, easy-to-read program. It may seem backward to discuss style before you know how to program, but style is the most important part of programming. Style is what separates the gems from the junk. It is what separates the programming artist from the butcher. You must learn good programming style first, before typing in your first line of code, so everything you write will be of the highest quality.
Contrary to popular belief, programmers do not spend most of their time writing programs. Far more time is spent maintaining, upgrading, and debugging existing code than is ever spent on creating new work. The amount of time spent on maintenance is skyrocketing. From 1980 to 1990 the average number of lines in a typical application went from 23,000 to 1.2 million. The average system age has gone from 4.75 to 9.4 years.
Most software is built on existing software. I recently completed coding for 12 new programs. Only one of these was created from scratch; the other 11 are adaptations of existing programs.
Programmers believe that the purpose of a program is only to present the computer with a compact set of instructions. This is not true. Programs written only for the ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.