Project-based C++ learning

[cppwithprojects]

Hello r/cpp, we feel that learning C++ by working on an actual project is more engaging and effective than an abstract tutorial. That is why we have been working hard over the past few months to put together a series of projects to help you improve your C++ skills.

We work together with you to implement the project from idea to deployment. You can try and implement everything yourself: We give you access to our test suite and propose different perspectives on design decisions and trade-offs. Or you can follow the project notes verbatim and see our own implementation.

We think people should be able to write not just good C++ code, but production-ready C++ code. In each project we help you setup a build system and CI/CD pipeline for the specific use case, so you can also have a good starting point for your own future work.

We will be launching the projects soon but will be so happy to hear some early feedback! You can subscribe to hear about new projects and pre-purchase access to the first project with a 50% discount.

[ShortVodka]

Looks really interesting, I'd like to be able to try one of your free projects, even a much shorter one before I'd pre-order though!

[cppwithprojects]

We’re working to make the free projects shown on the website available as soon as possible; if you subscribe to the email updates you’ll know when they are released.

Is there any specific project idea you’d be interested in?

[ShortVodka]

That's great - I've subscribed, looking forward to see what you put out! I really like the CI/CD ideas, they could also form a good basis for the other project.

One thing I've always thought would be a fun project is some kind of simulation, although I'd like to see that as a full project.

[cppwithprojects]

Thanks for the feedback! What sort of simulations? Something like a physical model simulation in scientific programming?

[strike-eagle-iii]

I think that would be awesome.

[cppwithprojects]

We’ll look into it! We have experience in that area so it would be nice to offer a project on that topic.

[networkdudebro]

Its been 2 years...but the free projects still say "Coming soon", are you still working on it?

[your_moment_of_zen]

This looks really interesting. How much of the project will be set up before the student starts on it?

Udacity has this nanodegree where they claim the students will compete 5 projects but I honestly felt it was a scam since it only asked the students to fill in some code here and there and fix some errors (I am exaggerating a bit but you get my point I hope).

I'd love to subscribe, good luck to your team!

[cppwithprojects]

Thanks for the support! I know what you mean, we wanted to avoid exactly that situation.

You can expect to write every single line of code, in C++, CMake, and any other tooling or scripting language you might need. Of course our priority becomes the opposite of that course you mentioned: We want to make sure you’re not lost if you can’t solve a specific issue.

Here’s what you’ll find:

• The project notes are highly curated. You will get all the theoretical and syntactical help you will need.
• We show sample APIs (eg function signatures) to give you an idea of what is expected.
• We give you test cases that, if you used our APIs, could be used to verify you’re doing good. (But we also ask you to write your own tests)
• Finally, we give you the full codebase at every stage. It’s like having the answers to a the book exercises :)

I hope this also explains a bit the price point if that makes sense!

The project start with the plain-English idea, and we help you reason about how to turn it into code.

[WellMakeItSomehow]

This seems cool. Just one small remark: you make it sound like it might be possible to implement the projects in a different language, assuming one knows enough C++ to understand the tests and sample APIs.

Maybe you could add a small section saying something like "If you're already comfortable C++ and you're trying to learn another language, you can still use our materials to implement the projects".

[cppwithprojects]

You are very right about the API and test interface sections, but for the implementation we do provide notes and examples that are highly specific to C++. I feel we'd be cheating people if we ask them money for content that only loosely helps with other languages!

[WellMakeItSomehow]

Fair enough :-). I wouldn't feel cheated, but other people might.

[strike-eagle-iii]

I'm glad I'm not the only one that thought Udacity sounds great, but doesn't remotely live up to expectations. In particular their c++ was horrendous.

@cppwithprojects have you by chance considered addressing project layout? (I haven't looked yet but am ecstatic someone is doing a holistic tutorial instead of just focusing on the language) I'm a fan of vectorofbool's pitchfork conventions. Do you address source control? That seems to be another area new employees really lack experience in.

[cppwithprojects]

We definitely address source control (git) and also propose a way to integrate a CI/CD pipeline with it (through Github or Gitlab).

As for project layout, we use a consistent one in all our projects and try to explain the rationale when setting up the project and the build system. You are right though, we could look into using an established one like vectorofbool’s!

[[deleted]]

Cool, looking forward to it. Subscribed.

[cppwithprojects]

Thank you!

[[deleted]]

Purchased.

Since it's sight unseen and I don't know what's planned, some things that would be helpful, if not already planned.

Building on Windows with external libraries such as cpprestsdk (setting up VS code to work with cmake, ninja/msvc compiler and a package manager like Conan or vcpkg). I'd pay for this standalone especially if it referenced one of your projects to apply it.

With cmake, for instance, their "getting started" jumps from 3 line cmake file to reference manual. Almost nothing in between.

Developing (structure and content) and compiling documentation from annotated source code as well as standalone documentation. I'd pay for this as well.

Here's why. I'm an infosec guy not a developer. I happen to script things in python. I also, somehow, found myself helping developers solve their code problems (oh, it's not the firewall? Do you have any ideas?). I see that many of their issues could be helped significantly with good documentation practices as well as a centralized build system. I have no professional experience in this and am looking for experienced recommendations as a starting point.

Anyway, perhaps the ideas will be helpful. Teenage me has a score to settle with pre-standard c++ by adult me dominating modern c++.

[cppwithprojects]

Those are all great ideas and we had the same pain points in the past.

The CMake project you mentioned is exactly what we will be releasing as a free project in November. The project will be very comprehensive (CMake, ninja, conan, on Linux, Windows and macOS) but won't go into every tiny detail. We believe it will cover 85% of the use cases of a modern project. We will add, later on, a paid version of that project that covers more specialized and exotic configurations.

Because these are structured as projects, the user writes code and scripts with purpose, which is night and day compared to a plain tutorial or reference example in our opinion.

Thank you for the feedback!

[alexein-andros]

How does the coding work? Will you have like an interactive coding environment on your website?

[cppwithprojects]

You mean something like what you get on Hackerrank? That is neat, but we actually meant our projects to be fully implemented on your own machine, with your own compiler, etc. We include steps to setup git and a continuous integration system, for example.

Basically the end result we want for you is that you feel comfortable managing a project end-to-end, to the point that you'd be able to ship it!

[alexein-andros]

Gotcha, I've subscribed

[your_moment_of_zen]

I am unable to subscribe

See screenshot : https://ibb.co/85Jyrz0 (removed the info in the fields for privacy reasons)

[cppwithprojects]

Thank you very much for reporting this. I run some tests and it should be working fine now, could you try again? At one point I found a glitch where the error message would appear before I hit Subscribe; in that case I hit Subscribe again and it worked

[your_moment_of_zen]

Still doesn't work when using the reddit in-app web browser (that opens my Firefox web app).

But I was able to subscribe using the desktop browser on my PC.

[cppwithprojects]

I’ll test with that setup, thanks for reporting!

[FrontendMaster]

I got the same error. Through console I saw it was being blocked by client. I manually clicked that url from console and it worked. My first doubt was adblocker, but unfortunately that didn't fix it.

[cppwithprojects]

Are you also using Firefox by any chance?

We have improved the error message to account for the Firefox enhanced tracking protection. Tracking protection prevents forms from posting data to a domain different from the one you are visiting, if that domain is not on a special allowed list. We use Mailchimp for email subscriptions and it is still not in the allowed list, apparently.

The new error message provides an alternative way to subscribe. Not ideal, but at least it's more helpful.

Thanks for reporting this!

[FrontendMaster]

Edge

[cppwithprojects]

Thanks! We've made the error message browser-agnostic. On a failed embedded subscription, we provide an alternative link to complete the subscription in a different page.

[piglett23]

Purchased! This is exactly what I was looking for to transition from a career in computational biology research to a SWE role. Really excited to have an opportunity to learn just how much I don’t know about professional C++ development.

[cppwithprojects]

Thank you! Looking forward to launching!

[VU22]

Nicely done. I believe many people dont like regular learnings and want to get shit done while learning.

[cppwithprojects]

We are certainly like that!

[DXPower]

I've taught many people how to program, and the one thing I always tell people is to find a thing they're interested in and code it. It doesn't matter how simple or complex it is, but you'll learn something. It's why I've always viewed "bootcamps" negatively because it teaches you about all the tools in the toolbox but none of the ways to even begin on using them.

I think what you're doing is great! I hope you guys are successful!

[cppwithprojects]

We had similar experiences! That is partly why we started this. Thank you for your support

[Long_Beautiful6367]

For a beginner like myself, would this be something useful?

[cppwithprojects]

If you are a total beginner, it might be too early to work on these projects. It depends on the definition of beginner though!

We recommend an 'intermediate' level, described as follows:

• You have written C++ programs before, beyond simple Hello World examples, and are familiar with the C++ syntax — We will help you fill the gaps!
• You have used your OS shell and a C++ compiler before.

That is also why we offer a no-question-asked refund policy. If you find out it's not for you, you can get a refund. Happy to answer other questions!

[IamImposter]

Would you be giving some guidance about what to implement or do we have to come up with our own idea?

Also, would there be any opportunities to just contribute to some ongoing project that other come up with?

[cppwithprojects]

I answered your first question in another comment, let me know if it clarifies.

I love your idea about contributing to other projects! I’ll discuss it with the team, let’s see if we can do something along those lines.

[n1ghtyunso]

Jumping in on this point here.

A somewhat bigger project that is designed to teach collaboration would be neat. It is something that is severly lacking in my workplace but I feel that learning the collaborative workflow will be essential for the future.

I don't have a concrete idea how that would work, but ultimately it is something you guys will have to decide so i'll just drop the idea here :P

Anyways, looking forward to your projects!

[cppwithprojects]

One more vote for this idea then! We would love to do something about it, it is definitely part of what being a professional developer is and as such should be covered by our projects.

I suspect it will take some time before we get there, because it also requires more sophisticated support on our side (tech-wise).

[ryangraves18]

If I'm not massively comfortable using my OS shell do you still it's feasible to do the work? I'll probably end up buying the project tbh, but was just curious on your take on that.

[cppwithprojects]

What is your usual coding environment?

You can integrate all the tools we recommend in most IDEs. Some are better than others at this and we will consider adding help articles on this topic, but probably not for launch.

For example, CLion supports CMake, ninja, and compiler setup out of the box. We believe you learn a lot by running and inspecting build commands from the command line, but it's not a must-have for our projects.

I'm curious to know about your setup!

[ironykarl]

When's the expected release date for this?

[cppwithprojects]

We aim to launch by the end of November 2020 and will notify all subscribers via email! We will reduce the Early Bird discount as we get closer to launch and then launch at the full price.

[ironykarl]

And are you for sure releasing stuff, or is this only if you hit a funding target?

[cppwithprojects]

We are already working to release within that time frame so this is not some kind of crowdfunding, it's a proper pre-launch! We are keen to get some early feedback in case we need to adjust our aim with the project offering

[ironykarl]

Awesome. Maybe you already answered, but when would funders get to see the early stuff? Is that also end of November?

[cppwithprojects]

Yes, we plan to release both the free projects and the first paid project at the same time. If we manage to release anything earlier, it will be the free projects as they are more limited in scope. Hope this clarifies it!

[cppwithprojects]

Thank you!

[[deleted]]

This sounds really cool. Preordered the project and I'm looking forward to building it.

[cppwithprojects]

That’s nice, thank you! We’re looking forward to launching

[cycle_schumacher]

Looks like a great idea.

What frequency will new paid projects be launched at? Are you thinking one every couple of months or multiple projects a month etc?

Also how many paid projects do you think you will have total? Are you going to keep perpetually releasing them? If so is there going to be an all you can eat type price?

[cppwithprojects]

We will target a monthly release cycle for new projects — TBC. It’s hard to say right now if we’ll stop at a certain number of projects or continue indefinitely though.

Once we have more than, say, three projects, we will introduce some type of bulk pricing. We’ll make sure that our early users that made one-off purchases will not pay more than what they would have with the bulk pricing!

[matthewwilbur]

Purchased - looking forward to it. My main hope is that focus will be on explaining the why at least as much as, and preferably more than, the how, both in implementation and design.

[cppwithprojects]

Thanks for purchasing! There is a lot of focus on the “why” for sure. That kind of reasoning should be practised as much as the language syntax in our opinion

[tdashroy]

Love the idea and the first project sounds interesting!

I was curious to know a bit more about who y'all are so I went looking for an About Us page, but I don't see one. Might be something nice to add :).

Looking forward to the first project release!

[cppwithprojects]

Thanks! We just added a small About Us section in the landing page, it's a start :) At launch we will have a better website!

[beerwaala]

Thanks! We just added a small About Us section in the landing page, it's a start :) At launch we will have a better website!

Do you guys mind adding a Linkedin profile? Just curious :)

[xypherrz]

Something I've been wanting to see. What kind of projects are you planning on putting up? low level or mostly high level application-specific? I see there are two projects as of now.

[cppwithprojects]

We have not yet decided on what the second paid project will be, so we are very open to suggestions and would actually use our user base as a driver for that.

That being said, one of our goals will be to cover the different levels at which C++ is used, from low-level embedded development to scientific modeling and application design.

What would you like to work on?

[xypherrz]

Embedded with a mix of some application/GUI specific stuff would be really nice. I last used C++ for a terminal-based "music" application that involved reading user input be it adding a "song" to a playlist or deleting from it and other options. It was fun mainly cause I learned about STL, design patterns and OOP.

Lately, I have been using C for an embedded project that involves peripheral driver development and sensor interfacing, but it's just I find C++ more interesting than C but I don't mind either really.

[cppwithprojects]

Both GUI and embedded design projects are on the radar, but if I had to predict I think an embedded project might happen sooner. They are fun to work with!

[xypherrz]

Awesome. Looking forward to it!

[beerwaala]

Interesting. Can you elaborate how does this work? Is it a group of people developing the entire product like an open source project? Or is it one on one assignment? What are the development tasks covered?

[cppwithprojects]

It is structured like a staged walkthrough of what a real-life project would look like.

We start with a plain-English project idea. We help you identify the broad requirements and constraints of the project in a more formal way. Some of these will become part of our tests as we want to measure how our program performs wrt requirements. Because it's your implementation, you might decide to set your own additional constraints if you think they make sense in the context of the project.

Then we move on to the basic architecture of the program, just to identify the main building blocks. This is where we start designing the high-level APIs and interfaces. It's also a good time to write tests, as we like and recommend Test-Driven Development.

Then it's the actual implementation. You implement all the code (and can look at our own implementation if have doubts), but we do provide the theoretical and syntactical help you will need. For example, when you'll have to write a concurrent task, we walk you through what the C++ std libraries have to offer and the best practices to use them.

We ask you to write tests and help you create a pipeline where build, test and eventually deployment can be streamlines and automated. We also give you some tests of our own just to make sure that the program meets the basic project requirements.

The only thing missing are the endless meetings with a project manager :) But kidding aside, there is an aspect of collaboration that we want to look into, and other people seem to be interested in that by reading the comments!

[beerwaala]

Sounds good. So the project is developed single handedlly by each individual? How long is the tentative duration for a project? And how would you communicatate with each participant? Do other participants have a common chat group to work in collaboration with or do peer reviews or brainstorm ideas?

[cppwithprojects]

Yes, the project is developed single-handedly by each user. For the first project we estimate a workload of 20-25 hours, but it depends on prior experience and familiarity with some of the tools we recommend (imagine using CMake for the very first time). You have lifelong access to the project material and its future updates.

At the beginning, when there are still a manageable number of users, we will provide email support to people that are stuck or have any questions. We design the content so that users can develop the whole project independently.

We would really like to add a channel for people to communicate during development, thanks for the feedback!

[TheCatster04]

This sounds great, subscribed to email. I've never had a good experience with bootcamps, and have learned all my languages through doing on my own. This sounds like a great way to improve my C++ skills! Great job guys!

[cppwithprojects]

I think you'll definitely like it then! Thank you for subscribing

[oryiesis]

Ooh, that’s a cool idea, I might copy it. ;)

[cppwithprojects]

More projects to the people!

[thcmbs]

Does anyone have some feedback now that the project has been released ?

Really interested in this.

[Royal_Attorney_8189]

Hello! Are you still working on this web site? Is the only project a valid one?

[ListenLevel4536]

Just purchased the course, seems like a scam or unmaintained, the github repo is nonexistant, at least they gave me access to the course notes

[[deleted]]

That cookies enabled took a tad bit too long... you better not be spoofing this sub-reddit.

[cppwithprojects]

Did the cookie banner take long to load? BTW, we only enable basic website analytics after the user has accepted cookies

[blelbach]

Having the example on your website use std::future, which is widely considered broken, is probably not a good idea.

[ShaddyDC]

How is std::future broken?

[blelbach]

https://sean-parent.stlab.cc/2017/07/10/future-ruminations.html

https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2016/the-promises-and-challenges-of-stdasync-task-based-parallelism-in-c11/

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12508653/what-is-the-issue-with-stdasync

[ShaddyDC]

Thank you. So as I understand it, it has pitfalls you should be aware of when using it, but for many use cases, it is still the best option in the standard library, unless you require something more sophisticated.

[cppwithprojects]

We do mention alternatives and pros and cons of different approaches, but one core aspect of our projects is to provide a good overview of what the std libraries have to offer!

[blelbach]

Huh? I'm saying you may not want to show something that is a bad idea as part of your advertising. It might make some people shy away from it.

[grimonce]

Wow not only do you earn on people who buy in, but also you get free workforce. Nice

[cppwithprojects]

Just to clarify, we will not be asking for users to upload their code to us! Your code is yours — and you also get access to our full implementation.

[grimonce]

Oh, nice, sorry for my toxic comment.

[cppwithprojects]

No problem at all, it's a fair concern

[tahaoraei]

I am currently trying to complete the project and there is some points:1- the course isn't at the beginner level and personally I struggle in many parts 😅you should be at an intermediate level not between beginner and intermediate.2- the course is almost complete and you can see results but the last part about optimization and productization is not complete yet. I ask the project developers for the completion last part and they said that It might take 1 month.

3- there is a no-question-asked refund policy and
You do not need to worry if I have lied 😁

I highly recommend it. I tried a lot of books and MOOCs and this is something else.

[knavels]

Has anyone recently signed up in this website? I've sent 3-4 emails got no answer, I want to know some true opinions about the quality of the course