At the start of the lockdown, Pluralsight made its huge curriculum free to help those who were suddenly needing new skills to find a new job during the pandemic. I saw a huge number of views of my C++ course for those who don't already know how to program. It was ironic, because I was busy updating that course, a process that is finally complete.

Please check it out on Pluralsight. The new course is called Learn to Program with C++. (The similar-but-not-the-same Learn How to Program with C++ is the old one.) Here's what I did to the 6+ year old course:

• redid all the demos in the latest compilers (Visual Studio Community Edition on Windows; Clang on Ubuntu and Mac)
  
• added more Ubuntu and Mac versions of demos and tested EVERYTHING on all the compilers
• moved content to slides and then just demonstrated it in the demo, instead of trying to explain concepts during long demos where there's no typing or other "demo" action
• took a more "modern C++" approach wherever I could
• improved the names in my sample code, trying not to have a,b,c and the like if I could
• added some explanation of "make" and removed rather a lot of "how to get Visual Studio to be nicer" because it does that itself now
  

Plus I just generally tweaked samples, slides, and demos throughout the whole course based on comments I've had from new learners since the original publication. It's a better course.

People often say that C++ cannot possibly be taught as a first language, but that's wrong. Modern C++ is not that hard. This course is a little over 5 hours long and covers most of the syntax and punctuation you need, functions, classes, type safety, using templates from the STL like vector and string, and even touches on const and RAII. If you want to learn C++ for whatever reason, don't let someone else tell you that you must go and learn some "scratch" or starter language first before coming back to what you really want to learn.

If you already know one programming language, and concepts like "if" or "loop" then you don't need this course. C++ Fundamentals Including C++ 17 is for you. It covers even more syntax, punctuation, library, and design aspects of the library.

As always, if you don't have a Pluralsight subscription, you can get a ten day trial by clicking the big white square on the blue sidebar of this blog. Enjoy!

Kate