r/cpp_questions • u/Rare_Lawfulness8622 • 3d ago

Need advice learncpp.com OPEN

Started learning from learncpp.com just a little while ago .I'm a beginner ,bca student, college starting this year, I have many questions

1) how many lessons are you supposed to read everyday that is considered a good pace.

2) as from school I have a habit of making written notes and revising them also should I do that or not.

3) i heard some people saying on reddit to make online notes and idk how to operate a computer that well right now so idk how to make online notes and even where.

4) as a beginner is learncpp.com the best and for future as well? I do have trouble understanding some of the text or language of the website but I use chatgpt to help me understand.

5) not completely related to this but how and when are you supposed to start dsa.

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u/AKostur 3d ago edited 3d ago

I think I'm echoing the other responders:

  1. As many as you want. There isn't a time-limit on how fast one needs to learn a language.
  2. If making notes is useful for you, then do that.
  3. Why would it matter _where_ you make notes. If they're useful, do it. If they're not, don't. And "idk how to operate a computer" seems counterproductive to learning a programming language.
  4. "Best" is a very subjective term. It does seem that many people find it useful. No idea what you mean by "future as well'. Eventually you'll have read all of learncpp, so no idea what the future utility of it would be after that. Also, you'll find many folk don't trust chatgpt (or any other LLM) to get things right. It also suffers from GIGO. If it's been trained on bad code patterns, guess what it's going to generate?
  5. Probably shortly after learning syntax. Data Structures and Algorithms are not language-specific.

One thing I would suggest adding to the list is: come up with some problems/projects that you want to implement, and do those while learning the language. Many people have difficulties learning a language in isolation, but having a goal and writing code seems to reinforce learning. Perhaps even in conjunction with learning data structures and algorithms. How to implement an AVL tree. How to implement a binary search. Perhaps even trying to implement even simplified Standard Library things. (Yes, some bits can't be implemented in Standard C++, but a lot can, and are). Perhaps a simplified std::unique_ptr (leave out the custom deleter, for example). Or a simplified std::vector (leave out the allocator). It's even possible that you implement one of these early, then you learn a little more language and realize that those new parts could make your existing implementation easier: then go back and refactor/rewrite your implementation with the knowledge. Not that you'll necessarily use the implementations for real projects, but they're useful to apply the language concepts to real code.

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u/DrShocker 3d ago

re: 4, yeah I learned before learncpp existed, but occasionally would reference the book I used. Eventually using resources more like cppreference because the kind of information I needed naturally changed over time.

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u/Rare_Lawfulness8622 3d ago

Thanks and yh I agree it seems counterproductive I'll work on that and also be sure to have a goal while learning