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I don't think this is more than a minor issue. If you can't afford it, the book is very easy to obtain online for free, either through piracy or a paid / free trial Safari Books Online subscription. If you felt so inclined, you could pay for the book after making money with the C++ it taught you.
> My quest for relearning C++ started in November 2018. That’s great! I’ve been using it since 2013 and still haven’t learned it!
Just for context, I was such a C++ bigot at one time that my car's license plate read C++HACKR and my personal website was on the cpphacker.org domain. But somehow I drifted into doing more Java and wound up mostly leaving the C++ world.
Edit: heck, this conversation triggered such a pang of nostalgia that I just re-registered cpphacker.org. Maybe I'll go back to having a personal website there. I've been thinking hard about setting up a new personal site and ditching Facebook anyway...
I like that the author mentions the STL explicitly. The STL is one of the most beautiful libraries ever written. There are few language libraries that are as clear and well designed as the STL. Alex Stepanov is completely underrated outside the C++ community.
Personally, I find Scala standard library much easier to work with and at the same time much more flexible and powerful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Things I'd rather be doing: * C++ * Lua .. .. [a thousand other things] .. .. * Node * Javascript __ bottom of the pile.. The Node/JS ecosystem is such a steaming pile of garbage, I can honestly see with great clarity why people should be running from it back into the arms of C++[11,17] ..
You shouldn't make broad statements like that. In my personal experience, I have found Javascript much easier than C++. If I want to install a package, I can just do "npm install Now, I'm sure some people have an easier time with Makefiles, but I've found it even easier to get up and running in Javascript. Most of the tools in Javascript (create-react-app, Webpack, etc.) are very user friendly, making setup trivial.…
https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy
JavaScript is a simple language that can be made extremely complicated via "simple" tooling. You can open the node_modules folder and see how sausages are made. :-)
C++ is dealing with essential complexities, there is no silver bullet:
> My quest for relearning C++ started in November 2018. That’s great! I’ve been using it since 2013 and still haven’t learned it!
You can make whole applications without touching memory management with RAII patterns; and C++ APIs are usually not the Java OOP monstrosities everyone hates.
Operator overloading is just so damn useful . You can make very elegant APIs in C++ as a result.
What's there to regret? For purely edification purposes, there isn't a better OOP language ( though it encompasses other paradigms as well and isn't purely OOP ) since it doesn't have training wheels. You could hurt yourself with it but it certainly allows you to explore and learn. Also, you could "learn" it in a year, but it takes you a lifetime to master it.
C++ is not very canonical OOP. And by that I don’t just mean it’s multi paradigm nature, but it’s realization of OOP features. Using C++ teaches you mostly about using C++ and doesn’t really transfer across the paradigm.
One can't just learn C++ in one year, imho.
So I agree, 1 year doesn’t even begin to cut it. You need more than book knowledge, you need the experience of watching your masterpiece crumble under its own weight (sometimes several times) or have the joy of hunting some obscure bug because you failed to recognize the trap you had set for yourself.
I certainly wouldn't want to scare anyone off from C++, because personally I find the empowerment is worth the pain. It just takes time to learn what to avoid.