Part 1: C++ Building Block Essentials

The goal of this part is to ensure that you have a strong background in non-OO C++ skills with which to build the forthcoming OOP skills in C++. This is the shortest section of the book, designed to quickly get you up to speed in preparation for OOP and more advanced book chapters.

The first chapter quickly reviews the basic skills that you are assumed to have to progress through the book: basic language syntax, looping constructs, operators, function usage, user defined type basics (struct, typedef, class basics, using statement, enum, strongly-typed enum), and namespace basics. The next chapter discusses const qualified variables, function prototyping, prototyping with default values, and function overloading.

The subsequent chapter covers indirect addressing with pointers by introducing new() and delete() to allocate basic types of data, dynamically allocating arrays of 1, 2, and N dimensions, managing memory with delete, passing parameters...