Hey guys.

I know you've probably seen this question a million times. I'm looking for a neat idea to help advance my C++ programming skill level. I'd consider myself on the borderline between beginner and intermediate. I'm looking for something that would push me over to the intermediate side of the fence, ya know. If you know of a cool program that helped get you over the hump I'd be glad to know about it.

Thanks.

How about a decent algebraic calculator?

Base10,2,8,16
Statistics
various independent memory units
flexible precision up to 100 digits ...

:)

Cheers,
Tink

Nah, though this would help me out, math isn't my thing so it would probably be hard to find enough motivation to keep me on that one. Is there anything cool music wise I could do that wouldn't be something only an expert should try.

By the way, I appreciate the reply Tinkster. Thanks.

Well, I am going to assume you understand OOP with C++.

A good way to advance your C++ skills (and your event-based programming knowledge) is to learn Qt and just develop some simple games and such.

Qt is fully object oriented and so you can have fun creating your own widgets and such that inherit from the standard widgets of the Qt library. Qt can work with *nix and Win32 a well.

If you don't understand OOP with C++ yet, then definately get your nose to the books because that is essentially why C++ is so useful. Until then, good luck.

I do think I've got a decent handle on OOP as I've dealt with this concept in both C++ and Java. What is Qt exactly, and what's a widget. I've heard the latter mentioned a few times but I'm still not clear on what it is. Please excuse my ignorance.

Thanks for the reply biosx.

Qt is a library for building GUIs (like Gtk+, Motif, etc.) A widget is just some component of a GUI (like a button or a window or a checkbox). In Qt, all widgets inherit from the generic QWidget class. Qt also has various classes for dealing with threads, I/O, etc. in a platform indepedant way, but its main focus is GUIs.

Alex

try platying with filestreams in a complicated manner. Try manipulating them and storing the information in them in different ways, you may be suprised on how difficult it can be to store different data types and duplicate the orginal data with updates in the appropriate position.

Okay, so what might be a cool widget? And how do I get these Qt libraries?

Go to here to get QT and find out what it is.

You're going to have to decide on a cool widget for yourself.

You might want to check your distro to see if you have it installed. I might be mistaken, but I think KDE uses Qt.

I think that Java is better for client side development as well as server side solutions. If I were to use Standard C++ for some kind of project than it would be related to building a system. In that case I think that frameworks are used heavily. I'd focus on some kind of expert system, however the majority of system implementation is not effective unless you are working in a team that is guided by a software development process.

When you learned Java you were developing as a specialist. You used middleware, and specialized through the vendor libraries. On the other hand as a C++ programmer you should look at application development from the standpoint of a generalist. Focus on learning the system interface and even the hardware architecture.

To say the least, Java and Standard C++ are very different. I would like to develop in Standard C++ however I just don't have 300 developers at my command.

Well, I still haven't come up with a particular widget I'd like to develop, but I'm gonna look for some resources to help me learn the Qt libraries. Maybe that'll spark something. Hopefully these libraries are included with my linux distro( haven't checked yet ) cuz from the trolltech website it looks like Qt isn't free. Anyway, thanks for all the enrichment guys. I appreciate it.

You can install QT packages off of the Linux install disk. The KDE desktop was written in QT and the Kdevelop IDE has integrated the QT libraries. I think that charges only apply if you are a corporation using QT for enterprise development.

Well, I'm good to go then. Thanks GtkUser.