Goals

Like my previous book Thinking in C++, this book has come to be structured around the
process of teaching the language. In particular, my motivation is to create something that
provides me with a way to teach the language in my own seminars. When I think of a
chapter in the book, I think in terms of what makes a good lesson during a seminar. My goal
is to get bite-sized pieces that can be taught in a reasonable amount of time, followed by
exercises that are feasible to accomplish in a classroom situation.
My goals in this book are to:
Introduction 29
1. Present the material one simple step at a time so that you can easily digest each
concept before moving on.
2. Use examples that are as simple and short as possible. This sometimes prevents me
from tackling “real world” problems, but I’ve found that beginners are usually
happier when they can understand every detail of an example rather than being
impressed by the scope of the problem it solves. Also, there’s a severe limit to the
amount of code that can be absorbed in a classroom situation. For this I will no doubt
receive criticism for using “toy examples,” but I’m willing to accept that in favor of
producing something pedagogically useful.
3. Carefully sequence the presentation of features so that you aren’t seeing something
that you haven’t been exposed to. Of course, this isn’t always possible; in those
situations, a brief introductory description is given.
4. Give you what I think is important for you to understand about the language, rather
than everything I know. I believe there is an information importance hierarchy, and
that there are some facts that 95 percent of programmers will never need to know
and just confuses people and adds to their perception of the complexity of the
language. To take an example from C, if you memorize the operator precedence table
(I never did), you can write clever code. But if you need to think about it, it will also
confuse the reader/maintainer of that code. So forget about precedence, and use
parentheses when things aren’t clear.
5. Keep each section focused enough so that the lecture time – and the time between
exercise periods – is small. Not only does this keep the audience’s minds more active
and involved during a hands-on seminar, but it gives the reader a greater sense of
accomplishment.
6. Provide you with a solid foundation so that you can understand the issues well
enough to move on to more difficult coursework and books.