Tutorials..

ID:181993
 
Mar 31 2009, 11:42 am
Just are not enough. I've wanted to start working with C++ forever now, but I honestly hate doing things without reason or rhyme. I understand tutorials teach, but teaching is boring. I want a reason to do this, so I feel as though what I learned was applicable.

On this note, does anyone have any suggestions of what I could make that might actually serve a use out of C++? I'd be willing to learn whatever needed to do it, but I really don't want to do something like a calculator or that, because it's just blah, windows already has one. I totally understand that with enough searching, I could find probably anything on the interweb, but that's not really the point here.

PS: I don't want to make a game, or a game engine, or anything that will take an eon and a half to do, just something simple but would teach a lot.

.. hoping I'm making sense, because as I reread this, it's kinda not. Hopefully someone understands it though!
Mar 31 2009, 11:49 am
Something that encrypts or compresses files; there are a lot of algorithms out there, you could even create your own. You could also use DLL's in a BYOND project!
Mar 31 2009, 12:31 pm
There are many open source projects that would welcome somebody to implement fixes or features while developing C++ skills. Check out Inkscape, for example: they have a very active and friendly community and lots of practical improvement tasks that can be undertaken without being an expert programmer or spending a ton of time.
Apr 1 2009, 2:27 am
DivineTraveller wrote:
Just are not enough. I've wanted to start working with C++ forever now, but I honestly hate doing things without reason or rhyme. I understand tutorials teach, but teaching is boring. I want a reason to do this, so I feel as though what I learned was applicable.

On this note, does anyone have any suggestions of what I could make that might actually serve a use out of C++?

If you want to make something somewhat practical that you can learn a lot from, I suggest you make a calculator. Not a GUI-based one as you might find in Windows, but perhaps one like I made for a certain contest a year or so ago (the files for which are on my desktop PC which I have back home, so I can't give you a demo program of what it does). Basically, here were the contest rules as I remember them:

Using C++, write a calculator that can parse expressions such as "4+4", "4+sin(45)", "4+5*2", "4 + 5 * 2" (whitespace isn't a factor or delimiter), "(4 +4)/2", and so on. You can use libraries for standard input and output of text, but you can't use them for anything else (such as text parsing, calculations such as sin(), and so on). By the time you are done with a working program that is able to do this, you'll have had a hands-on approach at text-parsing, tokenizing, implementing formulae, and some other nice things you ought to get good with. After you finish that, another task would be to redo the whole thing using standard library functions (such as those to tokenize strings) to get practical real-world experience in using the libraries to accomplish your needs.

I think the Dev-C++ IDE comes with an OpenGL sample program that rotates a colorful triangle or something. You could practice doing that type of stuff, too.

Further, if you buy any decent programming book on C++, it will have plenty of programs where you get the code as you read through the chapters, and hopefully even more programming "problems" at the end of each chapter. Especially in later chapters of such books, the problem sets become even more involved and interesting.
Apr 1 2009, 2:23 pm
In response to Kuraudo
Kuraudo wrote:
If you want to make something somewhat practical that you can learn a lot from, I suggest you make a calculator. Not a GUI-based one as you might find in Windows, but perhaps one like I made for a certain contest a year or so ago (the files for which are on my desktop PC which I have back home, so I can't give you a demo program of what it does). Basically, here were the contest rules as I remember them:

Using C++, write a calculator that can parse expressions such as "4+4", "4+sin(45)", "4+5*2", "4 + 5 * 2" (whitespace isn't a factor or delimiter), "(4 +4)/2", and so on. You can use libraries for standard input and output of text, but you can't use them for anything else (such as text parsing, calculations such as sin(), and so on). By the time you are done with a working program that is able to do this, you'll have had a hands-on approach at text-parsing, tokenizing, implementing formulae, and some other nice things you ought to get good with. After you finish that, another task would be to redo the whole thing using standard library functions (such as those to tokenize strings) to get practical real-world experience in using the libraries to accomplish your needs.

I think the Dev-C++ IDE comes with an OpenGL sample program that rotates a colorful triangle or something. You could practice doing that type of stuff, too.

Further, if you buy any decent programming book on C++, it will have plenty of programs where you get the code as you read through the chapters, and hopefully even more programming "problems" at the end of each chapter. Especially in later chapters of such books, the problem sets become even more involved and interesting.

I actually did not have those things in mind when I had thought of a calculator (thought I mentioned them in my initial post, guess not..), despite my using trig functions daily now. I do think that's worth a shot then! Seems a bit easier than a basic chatting program, anyhow. (sorry stephen!)

Thanks!
Apr 1 2009, 10:07 pm
In response to Kuraudo
Kuraudo wrote:
DivineTraveller wrote:
Just are not enough. I've wanted to start working with C++ forever now, but I honestly hate doing things without reason or rhyme. I understand tutorials teach, but teaching is boring. I want a reason to do this, so I feel as though what I learned was applicable.

On this note, does anyone have any suggestions of what I could make that might actually serve a use out of C++?

If you want to make something somewhat practical that you can learn a lot from, I suggest you make a calculator. Not a GUI-based one as you might find in Windows, but perhaps one like I made for a certain contest a year or so ago (the files for which are on my desktop PC which I have back home, so I can't give you a demo program of what it does). Basically, here were the contest rules as I remember them:

Using C++, write a calculator that can parse expressions such as "4+4", "4+sin(45)", "4+5*2", "4 + 5 * 2" (whitespace isn't a factor or delimiter), "(4 +4)/2", and so on. You can use libraries for standard input and output of text, but you can't use them for anything else (such as text parsing, calculations such as sin(), and so on). By the time you are done with a working program that is able to do this, you'll have had a hands-on approach at text-parsing, tokenizing, implementing formulae, and some other nice things you ought to get good with. After you finish that, another task would be to redo the whole thing using standard library functions (such as those to tokenize strings) to get practical real-world experience in using the libraries to accomplish your needs.

I think the Dev-C++ IDE comes with an OpenGL sample program that rotates a colorful triangle or something. You could practice doing that type of stuff, too.

Further, if you buy any decent programming book on C++, it will have plenty of programs where you get the code as you read through the chapters, and hopefully even more programming "problems" at the end of each chapter. Especially in later chapters of such books, the problem sets become even more involved and interesting.

I may aswell attempt to do this, maybe something good will come out of this for me ;) I hope, Thanks! =)