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Human languages like English, French and Hindi all have one thing in common - An alphabet. The English alphabet has 26 letters. Put a few of these 26 letters into the right order and you have a word. Now put a few of these words in the right order and you have a sentence. Computers do things in the same way except the computers alphabet consists of two letters. 1 and 0. Yes, I know that these are numbers but to the computer its the same thing. This type of langauge is called machine language. Just like human languages you cannot simply put a bunch of letters in any order and expect to create a meaningful word. To write in machine code you must be able to understand things the same way as the computer and that's the problem. Humans find it difficult to translate what they want the computer to do into 1's and 0's.

This is where a programming language comes in. It can be thought of as a half way line between a human language and machine code. A programming language is higher level then machine code. All this means is that the programming language hides much of the complexity of machine code. So the closer a programming language is to human language the more high level it is.

C++

C++ is a high level language that was created in 1983 by Bjarne Stroustrup based on an older language called C. The main advantage C++ added over its predecessor was the concept of an object. Everything in C++ could be described as an object and each object could easily be reused. This way of programming is especially useful for large programs.

Allowing parts of a program to be encapsulated in an object is called an object oriented approach to programming. This approach has caused C++ to explode in popularity and become the most used application programming language around.

How hard is it?

Learning the basics of C++ can be accomplished fairly easily, although people sometimes complain that doing more advanced things such as adding graphics or sound is a little confusing. Hopefully GDD will ease the learning process a little, take a look at the rest of the site after you finish reading these tutorials.

Now that the introductions over carry on to the next stage.