C++ Is Very Difficult to Learn

If you want to channel all its power

A prevalent belief between both C++ programmers and those who only hear about the language is that it’s very difficult to learn it. But what is this based upon? We will see that part of this belief is historical; not only has C++ been around for almost 30 years, but the initial standard was both unforgiving to programmers and required a lot of knowledge of memory management. Modern C++, after consequent improvements brought by the new standards C++11, C++ 14, C++ 17, C++ 20, and C++ 23, allows programmers to write code that is very similar to Java or C#. However, C++ has its specific niche in systems programming, which makes it necessary for programmers to learn more topics than necessary for other modern languages.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

• Why is C++ perceived as difficult to learn?
• The hard parts of C++ and how to grasp them
• The Stroustrup method for learning C++
• The test-driven method for learning C++
• With great power…