I am just starting C++ and want to get a good sense of how long it will take me to understand C++ pretty well. Thanks

Like anything in life, this is not a matter of time, but experience!

Th best way to learn his try!

Um, before I took the plunge into C++ I was already familiar with C, so I hardly noticed the transition.

Well, I pretty much started my Freshman year (1995) and I still learn things on a pretty regular basis. Of course, that''s always the way it is. Realistically, after six months to a year you should know enough to get useful programs written, but C++ is such a rich and complex language that you go through phases as you learn new techniques and add new tools to your programming toolchest. You''ll be at a point where you can find SOME way to do just about anything, but not necessarily an easy way. Over time (and this is the five years I''m working on) you continue to learn new tricks and styles of doing things, and that''s what makes some problems much easier to solve than you previously thought. Hope this helps!

-Brian

When I started learning C++, I already had a good knowledge of Visual Basic and QBasic. It took me about 2 months until I was able to create a graphical Windows application in C++. ("Graphical" meaning loading a displaying a bitmap to the screen, moving it around, etc.). That was using MFC -- it made it a lot easier. But there''s lots to learn, and I gradually moved away from MFC, and used classes more extensively, instead of relying primarily on structs and globals.

~CGameProgrammer( );

well, i agree w/ the others that it takes time, and your never really done learning, but, i started out w/ a good foundation in qbasic, and i learned to use c++ efficiently between the beggining of this school year and today. im not saying i know vc++, though, just c++, and i could probably write just about any program in dos... i actually know more about c++ than my CS teacher, thanks to all the tutorials and stuff on the internet, and also to Borders...

Still learning, alot. Learnt the more basic stuff in about a week (moved to C++ to C so it wasn''t really that painfull), enough to make a program in DOS/console.


"I think, therefore I am...I think"

hahahahaahahhaha. I just started learning C this month, but im doing pretty good at it. Im at chapter 13 of Sam''s teach yourself C in 24 hours by Tony Zhang. I still know nothing about Windows programming in C nor do I know how to add graphics into my C projects, but thats ganna change since next month im ganna go to barnes and Nobles and get 2 books, one on game programming with graphics and one on Win32 programmins, Also theres really no difference between C and C++, You can make the same programs with each, Look at John Carmack he uses C for all of his games.

I first learned QBasic when I was small (dunno 8 I guess)
I learned Qbasic pretty fast. It took 2 month, but I wansn''t studying it everyday.
Skip 6 years and I got VisualBasic. VB was a complete piece of cake. I didn''t even bother buying a book on it.

Then I bought Visual C++. I didn''t find it as hard as I thought it would be. I read that ''Teach yourself C++ in 21 days'' in 10 days.

My advice to you is to learn Basic first then go to C++.

I learned Qbasic and Pascal in High School (we had a good computer science department). I later learned VB and a very small amount of C++ on my own. In college I learned some assembly and ADA. When I finaly decided to learn C (i wanted to start work on a MUD) I grabed a ''teach yourself C in 21 days'' book, took a couple hours to skim it, and was ready to start programming. Of course I didn''t know everything, but the more programming languages you learn, the more you realise that the ideas are the same, there are just slight differences in syntax.

** please direct all typo/spelling mistakes to /dev/null **