Briggs - C++ for Lazy Programmers: Quick, Easy, and Fun C++ for Beginners

Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the author in this book is available to readers on GitHub via the books product page, located at www.apress.com/9781484251867 . For more detailed information, please visit http://www.apress.com/source-code .

Surely theres no shortage of C++ intro texts. Why write yet another?

Im glad you asked.

Ever since moving from Pascal to C++ (back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth), Ive been underwhelmed by available resources. I wanted something quirky and fun to read, with sufficient coverage and fun examples, like the old Oh! Pascal! text by Cooper and Clancy.

Its about time we had this again. Even a perfectly accurate text with broad coverage gives you nothing if you fall asleep when you read it. Well, nothing but a sore neck.

But the other reason, of course, is to promote laziness.

We all want our projects to be done more quickly, with less wailing and gnashing of teeth. Sometimes, its said, you have to put your nose to the grindstone. Maybe, but I like my nose too well for that. Id rather do things the easy way.

But the easy way isnt procrastinating and dragging my feet: its to find something I love doing and do it so well that it feels relatively effortless. Its producing something robust enough that when it does break down, it tells me exactly what the problem is, so I dont have to spend a week pleading with it to explain itself. Its writing code that I can use again and again, adapting it to a new use in hours instead of days.

Youll benefit from this book if youre a beginning programmer or one who hasnt yet learned C++ or its descendants like Java or C#; if you already know a C++-like language, you can go a little faster.

Its surely more enjoyable to make programs with graphics and WIMP ).

Figure 1

A game of Freeciv, which uses the SDL library.

Why SSDL?

but although SDL is relatively simple, its not simple enough to start with on day 1 of programming with C++. SSDL ( Simple SDL) saves you from needing to know things we dont get to until Chapter ). It also hides the initialization and cleanup code thats pretty much the same every time you write a program, and makes error handling less cumbersome.

You may want to keep using SSDL as is after youre done with this book, but if you decide to go on with SDL, youll find you know a lot of it already, with almost nothing to unlearn: most SSDL function names are names from SDL with another S stuck on the front. Well go into greater depth on moving forward with SDL in Chapter .

Software You Will Need

Your compiler, plus various free SDL libraries (SDL2, SDL2_Image, SDL2_TTF, and SDL2_Mixer), my free SSDL library, and (for Chapter .

SSDL is available at www.apress.com/9781484251867 , as is my sample code.

In Unix, you may choose to install the GNU Free Fonts library, or msttcorefonts, Microsoft Core Fonts for the Web . Look for ttf-mscore-fonts and fonts-freefont-ttf (Debian and Ubuntu systems) and gnu-free-fonts-common and msttcore-fonts- (Red Hat and Fedora), remembering that systems differ, standards change, and Unix is hard. But if youre using Unix, you knew that. I use Microsoft Core Fonts for the Web in the example programs.

Programming with sound may not be practical over remote connections, because of the difficulty of streaming sound. If using Unix emulation, you might check the emulators sound capabilities say, by playing a video.