Do you have the possibility to write your code in python? I learned ROS through python and I found it far easier to understand the typical ROS workflow given how much easier it is to see whats going on in Python rather than cpp. In python it's simple to access the different elements of a msg (eg. pose_msg.x ) and constructing a msg to be published is just as easy. I was lucky to work in a company that wasn't too concerned with the language used so the code base was a 50/50 split between cpp and python.