Preparing for CS250: Outline

What You Need to Know

Computers and Programming Languages

• The programs used to manipulate and translate a C++ program: editor, preprocessor, compiler, linker, loader, IDE

• The various stages or forms of a C++ program: source code, object code, executable program

Basic Elements of C++

• The lexical (character level) elements of a C++ program: comments, special symbols, reserved words, identifiers, whitespace

• The categories of C++ data types: simple (a.k.a. primitive), structured (a.k.a. compound), & pointers

• The simple data types of C++: int, float, double, char, bool

• How to declare variables

• The basic operators of C++ and the syntax of expressions

• Assignment statements

• Simple I/O

What You Need to Know

• Input and output streams.

  • The “standard” input (cin) and “standard” output (cout) streams.

• Input

  • Reading data with >>

  • Reading data with get and getline

  • Determining the status of an input stream

• Output

  • Output with <<

  • endl and \n

  • Formatting output (manipulators)

• Reading and writing files

What You Need to Know

• The if and if else structure.
• The conditional (?:) operator
• Statement blocks ({ … })
• The switch structure.
• Loops
  • the while loop
  • the for loop
  • the do…while loop
  • break and continue
• The idea of simple versus compound statements.
• Nesting of loops and conditional statements

What You Need to Know

• Calling common predefined functions (from <math>)
• How to declare a function.
• How to return an output from a function.
• Return types, including void
• Value, reference, and const reference parameters
  • Which to use for input, and which to use for output.
• The scope of an identifier
  • the effects of { }
  • The scope of identifiers declared in for loop headers
  • “local” and “global” identifiers
• Overloading of functions
• Default parameter values

What You Need to Know

• The enum type.
• The typedef statement
• The namespace

What You Need to Know

• The string type
• The ‘.’ notation for calling string functions
• Common string functions
  • Getting and changing individual characters
  • Concatenating (appending) strings
  • selecting substrings
  • searching and replacing within strings
• String I/O

What You Need to Know

• Declaring arrays (static)
• Indexing into an array
• Arrays and functions
  • passing arrays as parameters
    • The [] and * notation in parameters
  • dangers of returning arrays from functions
• Common array processing
  • Reading and writing arrays
  • Searching an array
• Multi-dimension arrays
• Character arrays (a.k.a. “C strings”)
  • Null-terminated character arrays
  • Converting between character arrays and strings

What You Need to Know

• Declaring structs (a.k.a. “records”)
• Accessing data members (a.k.a. “fields”) in a struct
• Copying structs
• structs and functions
  • passing structs as parameters
  • returning a struct
• structs and arrays

What You Need to Know

• How C++ source code is divided into files

  • header files
  • compilation units

• How a C++ compiler processes source code that has been divided.

  • The #include directive.
  • Other pre-processing commands
    • The use of #ifndef and #define in header files.

• The difference between a declaration and a definition.

  • Dividing declarations and definitions among headers and compilation units.