(Jan 29, 2010 04:27 PM)Amor Wrote:  1) Anything and everything (except for some embedded systems which I'm told use C) games, keyloggers, applications (business or otherwise), Operating Systems (Windows is not 100% completely coded in C++ but a portion of it is or so I'm told)
2) I wouldn't know.
3) Not really but it's a really powerful language. Once you learn one C-like language you'll easily be able to pick up others (C#, C, Java, etc.)
4) I don't know. I don't know any cool tricks but I know there's some "cool tricks" that you can do to make your code run faster like loop unrolling and stuff like that (which you should also be able to do in other languages). Also you can make certain data structures (such as a "Skip list" (approaches O(lg n) for access) or a "DSM" (Design Structure Matrix) that can do some pretty cool things but you can pretty much do the same in any other language.

(Jan 29, 2010 07:28 PM)Amor Wrote:  That was a quick post and I apologize but to expand on the "easy to learn" bit, yes and no. It makes sense and I learnt all the basics in about 3 months then OOP (Object Oriented Programming) in another 3 months, I moved onto Data Structures and some more advanced stuff and I'm still there right now. I'm still learning (and it's been about a year and a half).

Right now however I am trying to pick up PHP and SQL and work on that.

If you're dedicated then it can be done. In fact you can do it without the need for a school to teach it to you. I actually wish that I learnt by myself (albeit it would have been at a slower pace) but that's just me. It's not easy by any means but it depends on the amount of dedication that you have.

Here's what I suggest you do if you're dedicated and want to learn by yourself. Pickup a paper textbook on C++ programming (or an e-book) I personally prefer having the paper version of the text at my side rather than the e-book but that's just personal preference. The one I suggest is "C++ Programming" by D.S. Malik, I really like it.

Download VMWare or VirtualBox, setup a Virtual Machine and install a *nix distro on it (Ubuntu or w/e, I use Fedora 8 and Slackware). From there learn how to use something like vim or emacs and compile your basic programs with gcc.

First few programs I suggest are the obvious "Hello World", a basic calculator, Fibonacci numbers, and probably something to do with IO (ie. read a text file and output it using ROT13 or something). There's lots of things you can do and once you get comfortable with that you can start doing more complicated things like objects and inheritance and making more complicated programs like a command like based "Bank account manager" (making "account" objects and doing manipulations on them). Once you get the hang of that maybe learn how to use the QT library to make graphical programs (Note, I'm not that far yet I only know about people using the QT library to make GUI's and nothing else about it yet).