The Pasture of C++ Notes

A while ago I needed to learn a programming language. But which one? There's a lot to choose from. Baffled and confused, I took a piece of advice from a computer scientist friend: "C++, because once you learn that, all other languages will follow". Nice and simple, now to learn it.

A lot of graduate students will start their studies without knowing a great deal of programming languages. This means that when they start, they need to learn it. So most places put on computing lectures for these students as soon as they start and, most of the time, they put it on the internet.

The following resource is, as it says, from the DESY Summer School. The notes you can get are a pdf of the slides/handouts that were used in the lectures. As always, lecture notes are quick to the point and they won't go unnecessarily out of the way. For example, the language FORTRAN is described as VW Beetle, whereas C++ is described as a Formula 1. Nice and snappy, but I think a more amusing comparison would be a plain to one of those ribbed things... Regardless, here it is:

https://www.desy.de/~blist/summerstudents/c++-intro-10-offhandout.pdf

A drawback of the notes is that they may not go into enough detail. That's why you can use another resource along side it. The cplusplus website has a really good tutorial that you can also download as a pdf:

http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/

To actually do the code you need a compiler. So I followed more advise from the computer scientist friend: "use Linux because it just works" - Ubuntu and g++! If you aren't a fan of the above two resources, try these out too: C++ Intro and C++ Reference.