Learning C/C++

[ic38]

I'm very interested in learning C/C++

I've got experience with php which is what I mainly do things in at the moment.

I want to broaden my horizons, so to speak.

I'm wondering the major differences between C and C++, recommendations...

Either a good tutorial on the internet or a book someone found particularly good.

Thanks in advance.

[alpha]

You can try to run a search, both here and google. You should find many tutorials. Try the ones here at this site, and here. (hope this isn't against the rules).

There aren't too many differences with C and C++, as far as syntax goes. But the huge difference is that C is procedural and C++ is object-oriented. OOP can be very powerful. It can be tough for some to grasp the idea of OOP at first; but just keep practicing, and you will be fine.
As for recommendations, it is dependent on what you want to do; however, you do not need to learn C before C++, imo. I didn't learn C before C++, and I am still learning C++ (through a class, and on my own). Some would recommend learning C++, then C, because you learn a lot of C on the way of learning C++.

As for books, again, a search woud be ideal. try here, and here. There are many more sites with recommendations, as a search of here would help.

[Travis Dane]

C++ has everything C has and more, So learning C would make
no difference from learning C since C++ is perfectly backwards
compatible with C, I'm still wondering why some people
recommend learning C first, I sure din't.

[yamaha_r6]

A lot of people recommend C before C++ because there is a huge paradigm shift when going from an OOP to a procedural language. The transition backwards can be more difficult because you have to forgo many of the concepts of C++, whereas going from C to C++ you can apply additional concepts to a base knowledge.

If you're going to sit at home and write your own programs for your own personal use, either language will do. If you decide to get involved in a project, C is still the dominate language (for example the GTK+ tool kit, Linux Kernel, BSD kernel, enlightenment, GNOME, and a miriad of other C OpenSource projects). C++ hasn't caught on as much because there are still many old programmers out there who refuse to use it, and the concepts of OOP are not always required for a project. There are a few OOP projects out there (QT, KDE) but not as many as good'ol C.

My $.02

As far as good books go, Two of the best I've encounterd are:

C A Modern Approach by K.N. King
Pointers On C byKenneth A. Reek

The K.N. King book is the better of the two, but they are both superb books.

[joe_bruin]

c is not used because old programmers refuse to change.
c is much more portable than c++ (have you ever tried switching to a different compiler that uses a different stl implementation? it's not fun). c can be run on systems with no dynamic memory allocation (no malloc, no 'new'), which is often the case in embedded systems.

the truth is that c++ and object oriented programming make designing large programs easy and make coding convenient. they also have a tendency to encourage large memory useage and sacrifice performance for abstraction. virtual function calls are unacceptably slow when performance is critical. multiple inheritance ends up with classes that have unused (hidden) data fields that are a waste of memory. copy constructors, autopointers, implicit function calls (such as destructor functions), and implicit pointer indirection ('this'), all contribute to this and are things you do not what when you need tight control of your code. when you don't care about convenience, but performance and memory footprint are what matters, c is the only way to go.

some things that are written in c:
windows kernel and the win32 layer, linux kernel and most linux/unix applications (from 'apache' to 'Xfree86'), any bsd, solaris, aix, hpux, tru64, qnx, most other os's, most drivers, oracle, db2, sybase, ...