Chapter 1 of our text gives a very concentrated overview of the C++ language and syntax. Since it is presumed that students have taken their first course using the C++ language this chapter is not meant to be as a first introduction to the language, but instead can serve as a convenient reference for review.
At the same time, we realize that this chapter even includes many important subtleties of the language which may not have been discussed or suitable emphasized in a first course. So it is not that we expect that each student enters with knowledge of the entire content of this chapter. Rather than covering this entire chapter to start this course, we will choose to continually refer back to important sections of the chapter when particular issues need to be addressed.
For this lecture, we will try to specifically look at some of the more important issues which we will be reinforcing in the first written homework assignment as well as the first programming assignment.
For some perspective, here is a summary of the "familiarity" scores of the class based upon the online questionnaire (results as of this morning). Recall that each question was rated on a 1-5 scale with 1 being the least familiar and 5 being the most familiar.
4.30 Arrays 4.10 Pre/Post Increment (++, --) 3.90 Use of .h header files 3.70 Passing parameters 3.60 File I/O 3.50 Use of the 'const' keyword 3.50 Destinction between passing params by value vs. by reference 3.30 User-Defined classes 3.20 Constructors 3.20 Access Control (private/public) 2.60 Overloading an Operator 2.20 Copy Constructors 2.10 Pointers 2.10 Destructors 2.10 Casting between data types 2.00 Recursion 1.90 Exceptions 1.80 Use of 'templates' 1.70 Dynamic Memory Allocation (the 'new' keyword) 1.70 Linked Lists 1.60 Inheritance 1.60 Stacks 1.50 Queues