A Quick Introduction to C++ in pdf

This note introduces some simple C++ concepts and outlines a subset of C++ that is easier to learn and use than the full language. Although we originally wrote this note for explaining the C++ used in the Nachos project, I believe it is useful to anyone learning C++. I assume that you are already somewhat familiar with C concepts like procedures, for loops, and pointers; these are pretty easy to pick up from reading Kernighan and Ritchie's The C Programming Language.

I should admit up front that I am quite opinionated about C++, if that isn't obvious already. I know several C++ purists (an oxymoron perhaps?) who violently disagree with some of the prescriptions contained here; most of the objections are of the form, How could you have possibly left out feature X? However, I've found from teaching C++ to nearly 1000 undergrads over the past several years that the subset of C++ described here is pretty easy to learn, taking only a day or so for most students to get started.

The basic premise of this note is that while object-oriented programming is a useful way to simplify programs, C++ is a wildly over-complicated language, with a host of features that only very, very rarely and a legitimate use. It's not too far othe mark to say that C++ includes every programming language feature ever imagined, and more. The natural tendency when faced with a new language feature is to try to use it, but in C++ this approach leads to disaster.