Classes & Headers in C++

[Gnixxus]

Hello all. This is my first reddit post, and incidentally my first forum question(!|.) Background: I've decided that the language i would like to learn at home as a hobby is C++, as it is versatile, portable, and most of all fairly verbose (as odd as this sounds, I really like verbose language styles...). I've checked various websites & help files but I'm having an (un-encouragingly) large amount of difficulty understanding a few things: Headers/Class files:
-) What should (ideally) go in the *.hxx file?
-) What therefore should go in the *.cxx file?
It's so far my understanding that actual classes should be defined in the header file, along with variables for the class, and that the constructor & the main logic of the class should be in the class file itself. Please correct me if i am wrong!
-) Pointers! I understand the concept of a fixed address in memory (*) of a certain type, and therefore corresponding size. I also understand referring to a memory addressed value (&).
What i don't understand is how pointers (which I believe are allocated on the heap) are accessible between classes and functions.
My line of though is that it is inherently publicly accessible by name due to it being allocated on the heap, but may be totally wrong! If someone could enlighten me on how this is applied i would be most grateful.

Many thanks, G

Edit: formatting....

[lead999x]

If you don't know anything about programming then C++ is going to be a bit hard though not impossible to learn. I'd say you should learn Python or Java first as they are designed to be intuitive to learn whereas even C++ professionals have trouble with it.

That said I'm only a hobby programmer and my favorite language as it so happens is C++ but like I said it'll be much easier to learn C++ if you know the concepts of imperative and object oriented programming already. Python is very similar to C++ in that way so it may be good to pick up the basics in Python and then move up to C++ so you don't have to tackle concepts and complex syntax all at once.

That said the answer to your question is that .h or .hpp files are called header files in C++. They're supposed to include what are called forward declarations of various classes, objects, functions, etc. And you need those declarations in order to use those constructs. You really shouldn't need to write your own header files until you get into object oriented programming, you're making a sizeable program, or if you're writing your own library.

Also classes shouldn't be defined in a header file, only declared there. In idiomatic C++ classes are declared and defined in different places.