pniedzielski / nskicpp-writeups

Lessons and other information

Niedzielski C++ Course

Instructor: Patrick M. Niedzielski [email protected]

Prerequisites

This course assumes programming maturity and familiarity with more than one programming language. We will be covering gaps in individual student's knowledge, but understanding of basic computer science and software engineering concepts.

Students will be required to submit using GitHub, but are free to use any git hosting they want. Our development environment will be GNU/Linux; please contact me if you need help setting up a Linux-based system.

Assignments

I will be assigning many different resources for you to look at. I expect you to look at these critically, and try to understand the fundamental ideas in each of them. These may be talks, articles, chapters of books (provided to you or freely available online), or podcasts. Some of these may be optional, but it is still in your best interest to look at them if you can—usually they will be optional or recommended because they aren't freely available or are too long for a Fair Use copy.

Additionally, there will be some small coding assignments to demonstrate your understanding of a particular part of the language. Consider this code “living”—we will very frequently be coming back to it and looking at it again, so it is your best interest to write them and document them well.

Finally, we will be working on two projects throughout the course: a util project, which will contain utilities that you will find useful in any software project, and an assigned/negotiated project. The assigned project will be about applying what you have learned about C++ and software engineering, and will require you to learn about the domain of the project as well. These two projects will be ongoing throughout the course.

Learning

This course is structured around instructor-student interaction: you will be introduced to C++ and software engineering through the resources I provide, but this will be solidified by discussion with me (and to a lesser extent, with your peers). As such, I want you to be thinking critically about all the material you are shown in this class and everything I say, as well. Much of this is an art, and we will be looking at pros and cons of every design decision we come across.

As such, please, please come to me with your questions and ideas. Do not design and work on your assignments in a vacuum—this is a great way to fail. You are expected to learn, not to figure out on your own. When you can't figure it out, please ask at any point. I will get back to you as soon as I can.

Participation and Evaluation

In this course, you will not be graded on your work. Your goal here is not to get a good grade, but rather to get a good understanding of the course material. You are encouraged to collaborate with peers, and you will be evaluated not on your work, but on your understanding of your work.

As a result, we need a way both for me and for you to evaluate your understanding of the material. This will be done a number of ways, but the primary one will be by code review. After submitting your work, I will be commenting on it and evaluating whether it is acceptable as a final product. You are expected to respond to those comments, either answering the questions in them, explaining your reasoning for your design over other design, or changing the code to address the comments.

These comments will be things you should be asking yourself as you are writing software. Later in the course, you will be required to review your peer's submissions as well. These are the sorts of questions you should be asking. This will further demonstrate your understanding of the material.

In addition, this particular repository will contain lessons and other documents for the course. I encourage you to contribute if you have a comment; please do so by pull-request and not direct commit.

Licensing

Unless otherwise noted, the materials in this repository are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

I expect your work to be licensed under a Free Software and Open Source license. A commonly-used license in C++ is the Boost Software License, which is a permissive license like MIT/X11; this is a good choice. Another good choice is the GNU GPL, version 3.0 or later.

Schedule and Pace

I expect that some students will be ahead of others. This is fine. It is more important that you understand than you move at the same pace as others.

In other words, this course will be self-paced. Be respectful of the fact that your peers may be ahead or behind you, and be respectful of my own time.

The following are a rough sequence of topics we will be covering:

1. Introduction: We will be looking at from a very high-level perspective, trying to answer the question: What is C++? We will set up a development environment, take a tour of C++, motivate some goals in software design and engineering, and look at forms of tooling and uses of version control that you you should be aware of and using as much as you can. Assignments will be small pieces of code to get a feel for C++.
2. Building Abstractions: Here, we will be covering the C++ way of building abstractions. We will look at designing interfaces that are flexible, easy-to-use, safe, and testable. We will be learning about open abstractions, vocabulary abstractions, the pyramid model of software design, and customization dimensions. We will also be taking a look at the C++ standard library and the Boost software library. Throughout all of this, we will be introducing features of C++ that allow us to build the abstractions.
3. Performance: We will be peeling back some of our layers of abstraction and looking at what the compiler is actually doing. This will involve much lower-level abstractions that you will not have used extensively before. We will learn about compiler optimizations and be looking at assembly code generated by the compiler. We will also learn about performance testing. By the end of this unit, you should be comfortable reasoning about performance in a C++ program.
4. Error Handling and Signalling: We will be talking about the standard C++ error signaling means, exceptions, as well as what their strengths are and their weaknesses. Once we have covered the basic use of exceptions, we will look at how to make code exception-safe, when to use exceptions, and alternative means of error handling and signalling.
5. Advanced Tools and Pitfalls: We will be going back to topics that the last segments have introduced and looking at them in more detail. Specifically, we will be covering advanced features of the C++ object system, template system, and standard library. In addition, we will be filling in more details about we've learned that may surprise you; you will usually not run into these, but when you do, you will need to know these details, unfortunately. We will also play around with an experimental implementation of C++ Concepts Lite, a proposal to add constraints checking to the language. After this unit, you should have a relatively complete grasp of the C++ language and standard library.
6. Metaprogramming: We will be looking at the three subsystems of the library that allow us to do computation and processing at compile-time. You will be looking at idioms that facilitate this, and building abstractions above these idioms to make metaprogramming substantially easier.
7. Concurrency: We will be working with atomic variables, memory models, threads, and higher-level concurrency constructs. In addition, we will be looking at proposals to add coroutines, transactional memory, parallelism support, and additional high-level concurrency constructs to the C++ language.
8. Future Developments and Other Topics: We will be taking a look at the C++ standardization process and discussing proposals to extend the language. You will be evaluating proposals and gaining a sense of where the language is headed. We may also cover miscellaneous topics here which would not fit elsewhere in the course.

This schedule is ambitious and requires a level of participation from you as well.

Feedback

I appreciate feedback about the course and teaching style. Although by its nature I will be interacting with you throughout this course, I still would appreciate direct feedback.

Resources

We have a mailing list at [email protected] This is a great place to ask for help.

This repository will contain a number of good resources as well—check back frequently (or better yet, watch it to be updated of any changes).