Tuesday, February 6, 2007

The beginning

Welcome back,

I just want to start my tutorials of c++. To start a compiler, the program that translates source code into executable or runnable format that can be executed, is needed. My preferred compiler is GCC which is GNU Compiler Collection which is a collection of compilers for various languages, basically c and c++. It is shipped by default with most Linux distributions. A version for Microsoft Windows is available from the site http://www.mingw.org. Also an Integrated Development Environment, IDE, is available with a version of this compiler from http://www.bloodshed.net.

The installation of the compiler is so easy. for Linux it may be installed by default for most distribution if it is not you can install it using your distro program installation instruction. for example:

for Debian or Ubuntu as root:

apt-get update
apt-get install gcc g++

For Microsoft windows just run the installation program and follow install instructions.

The start will be with console applications, application that runs from the command line and uses only monitor as output and keyboard as input. Those applications will be used to learn the basics of the language and programming in general. Then we may advance to programming Graphical User Interface (GUI) based application using the QT library, an open source library for developing GUI applications, to know the basics of GUI applications.