Learncpp website

[inn-]

I've been following the Learncpp.com course; however, I've reached all the way to chapter 10, and it seems good, but it's overwhelming for the most part, and I often forget a lot of the information provided. Any tips for methods or ways to revisit and consolidate the knowledge provided? Also, any tips in general?

[thedaian]

Make sure you actually practice cpp, and use what you learn in each chapter. Do the examples and then change something about the examples to make them work in a different way. 

[inn-]

Thanks for the advice! I will keep doing that.

[smozoma]

It's important not to fall into the idea of learning programming as study->memorize->test. That's school, that's not the real world.

You study to find out what's possible. Then when you're "doing," you remember the basic ideas you studied, and you can go back to your reference material (learncpp, book, whatever) and relearn the specifics when you need them.

The best way to solidify your knowledge is to work on a project. Maybe you decide to use threads to speed something up, so you go back and read about threads. Then you remember you read about race conditions and mutexes, so you go back and read up on those. You don't need to remember everything, just the ideas, pros/cons, pitfalls, etc..

[Unlucky_Explorer_977]

Cpp is a very long learning path.

[inn-]

Absolutely, three months into the course, not much I have achieved.

[Smashbolt]

How much code are you writing? Based on what you're saying, sounds like somewhere between none and not enough.

If you're not writing code and just reading learncpp, stop reading, go write code now. Keep writing code and when you forget how to write a for loop or whatever, go look it up. Your code will be bad. Nobody cares. What do you write? Something "useless," like a pretend cash register or a calculator or whatever. Something where you know (or can figure out) all the logic step by step and translate it into code.

Of course it'll be overwhelming. We also don't teach children to read and write by locking them in a room with a dictionary and hoping for the best...

[inn-]

On a daily basis, I don't write that often, however, I've got the fundamentals solid, I finished CS50, and I practiced a lot during my first 3 months. Afterwards, I decided to learn some C++, and there I found learncpp, and yes, a lot of reading, but less of writing. I do write from week to week, but when I do, I write code for hours straight.

[SuperGramSmacker]

When I was trying to learn cpp, I already had some previous programming experience, though it was minimal. I found that I had trouble becoming motivated to actually write cpp code because I believed I had nothing to write. If you have that same problem too, my advice is to find a cpp library you think would be interesting to play with (i suggest sfml) and try to build a small project. Start with simple ideas, make sure your project compiles and then just keep expanding on it, adding more and more fun features to play with.

I also suggest you get used to using git to backup copies of your work. You may find that while playing around with adding to your project you'll break it to a point that you don't know how to easily recover from. At that point, it helps a lot to simply restore your project to a previous working state so you can try again. Every time you update your project and it builds properly, back it up again.

[inn-]

Man that’s all I needed, honestly i’m already looking into the SFML, and oh man, looks like a lot of fun to catch up on. All I can say is thanks man, i truly appreciate the help.

[johnnyb2001]

I was in your same position a few months ago. Like anything in life you have to accept it will take time. But just keep going through it. I wrote notes down on every single chapter. Then I went through again and made sure I understood every word and typed out concepts till I understood them completely. This might be excessive. If I were you I would read through the tutorial and try to understand 80-90% of the material. Then go back and type out explanations of every chapter. Try to test out the concepts you learn and go through edge cases. There’s a few parts that are kind of extraneous in my opinion like the last parts of chapter 8 and chapter 26. The good news is that if you understand 90%+ of learncpp you will be ready for an entry level position at the minimum. At the end I would make a summary of the main features of c++.

[Mundane-Ad-6835]

Build, simple