C++ in depth
In the course of evaluating the various visualization options, I discovered that I needed to learn a few more things about C and C++ in order to implement a visualization library. Rather than continuing to learn more features of the language incrementally, I decided that it would be better to just read a description of the entire C++ language! On Friday I grabbed one of the C++ books from my bookcase and started reading. The book is “C++ from the ground up” by Herbert Schildt. I’ve already learned a lot of things that I previously didn’t know existed in the language. I’m half-way through the book now and I plan to finish reading it Wednesday night. Once I’m finished with this, I should be able to read C and C++ code much more easily and I’ll be able to write code more efficiently because I will know all of the major options available to me. The book will serve as a reference for the detailed syntax until I internalize everything. Luckily, the language is very intuitive thus far.
I’m still hoping to begin implementing a visualization system before I leave for VA. I also need to read a few more items on my reading list to keep a good pace going. I’ll try to read while I’m in VA.
A brief summary of the things that I read about (in exhaustive detail) today:
- the const, volatile, extern, and static type qualifiers
- the register keyword (which I need to experiment with)
- enumerations
- bitwise operators |, &, ^, ~, >>, <<
- the ? operator
- the , operator
- a review of structures
- bit-fields
- unions
- classes and objects
- constructors and destructors
- friend functions
- the copy constructor
- the this keyword
I also found a research group in Computer Science and Engineering that may be useful some day: The Riverside Graphics Lab. They do visualization research and of course they use Unix / Linux.