I’m a junior this year, and want to learn enough C++ to code a robot by next year. Is this a realistic goal? Can anyone recommend any good books or videos or websites for learning C++? My high school doesn’t offer any programming classes, so I’m kind of on my own.
It is not easy, but this is certainly an achievable goal, as long as you stick with it.
I carried around this book with me everywhere I went my junior year, and was able to get up to speed quite quickly (ignore the 21 days thing). Look for the latest edition. The best thing I like about this book was the detailed code examples along the way.
Aside from that, the most important thing to do is to just code. Write code as much as you can. Get excited about it! If you have a mentor, ask questions (if not, ask here or other C++ forums). If you have anyone to learn with, do the same problems, compare answers and learn from each other. Reading a book or attending a class will only get you so far. Find some problems to do and try it. Write some code, learn from mistakes, experiment with it. There are plenty of programming problems and a lot that you can learn with just the basic tools (i.e. outside of using the robot, from just an IDE such as Code::Blocks).
I think that to properly answer this question I’d have to know where you’re starting from: Are you new to programming? Do you already know some other language? Do you already know C but not C++? Depending on which of these is the case I would recommend different things.
Here is the intro to c++ class at University of Missouri of Science and Technology notes / assignments.
http://classes.mst.edu/compsci1570/
It has videos too.
I’ve done some programming in Python, not a ton. I go to a small farm school, and no one really knows anything about computers. I’m working with my principal and counselor to get a programming independant study class. I"ve read that C++ is a very useful language to know, so I figured it would be advantageous to get a jump on it before college. Plus I feel like being able to code a robot in C++ would be a good goal to work towards.