Tuesday, January 19, 2010

C++ is getting to be interesting (like never before)

The more I read my new C++ book, the more I understand how does expierience with Java (and probably the other languages like PHP or Perl) help me to simply "suck the knowlege" out of it. It is really amazing how much these languages have in common. It is also interesitng how professional expierience affects the way new knowlege gets absorbed. Now, when it's completely clear to me how a "typical" (not to overexaggerate), large scale application is build, it is far much easier for me to "detect" those "big" things about the tools (like C++) I use. I can see the value of both Java and C++ better. Also, I can now imagine (from the architectural point of view), how both of the languages can be mixed together in one project in order to achive maximum performance (e.g. web applications processing large ammounts of data).

It totaly amazed me that learning a new language (syntax... completely) may be the metter of only two/three weeks. I remember it beeing so painful at the university.

Today I got to the part with bitwise operations (not really needed when programming in Java or PHP) and I finally completely understood them (in terms of, why and when to use them, why do people need them, etc.). Cool stuff, I used the bitwise operators before... but I always underestimated their real power and tried to avoid them for the sake of code complexity. The same with extern, volatile and static variables. For some reason it was never well explained to me (at the university). Hmmm.. why, when and what for should I use them. Now I get it :-)

Tommorow I will start with the "Object-oriented programming" part of the book. I expect to see even more cool stuff.

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