Afternoon all,

I'm looking at learning some C++, specifically to do some binary file parsing but knowing it would be useful for other things.
As many of you may be aware, I come from a Java background. I now spend a lot of time on the command line using custom bash and perl scripts. I have a very tiny amount of C knowledge.
I would like to get a good book that explains not only the mechanics of the language (such as this is how X works"), but also how a project might be structured (this goes in the main source file, that goes in a separate source file, you'd use a class for this, here's how/why we use headers). I'm not particularly interest in how to use loops as that all looks pretty much the same as Java (or vice versa).

Any suggestions would be greatly welcome, especially is they are available from Amazon (I've got gift vouchers to use!), I've had a look at a few 'C++ for java programmers', but they are all quite old and potentially out of date (?).

Many thanks,
Ben

Barring the 'standard' (Bjarne Stroustrop) book

I'll have a look at what I had and used at uni

in fact if you want the ones I have for the cost of postage it'll save me not needing to pack and unpack them when I move house next month

If you found them useful and they are of no use any more I would be very grateful.

Let me know if it's definitely ok and I'll pm you my address

Well I appear to have premptively jumped the gun while I was at work.. seems they are at my parents now so won't be able to get them for some time

Had a look in my Amazon history, main one was Bjarne Stroustrup's book as well as
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Programming-Pro ... b_title_bk

You'll probably breeze through it but the book is a good focus for picking up C language based quirks, for the most up to date language features, or for an expensive and very heavy paperweight
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Programming ... 001&sr=8-1

Is it just C++ programming or was there anything in specific you wanted to apply the language to?

The specific reason I want to learn C++ at this time is that I've been given a task at work. Some of the logs we get from the train get corrupted with the wrong time stamp, so a sliver of data is captured in 2004 rather than 2013. The 3rd party program that parses and displays the data doesn't fix this, it displays the data on an unbroken timeline in screens of 30 minutes, from the first record to the last and to navigate through the data you have six controls: Go to beginning of log, jump back 6 hours, jump back 30 minutes, jump forwards 30 minutes, jump forwards 6 hours, go to end of log. So, when we get corruption (which is all the time) we have to scroll through years of dataless screens.

We know the structure of the binary file that the logs are stored in, and someone has written a Java app to cut out just the day you are looking for, but he manages to corrupt some extra data in the process. I've been asked to do a better job I though that C++ looked to be a good tool for the job.

Heading to Amazon now to look at the books, thanks very much for the recommendations

Hmm.. what OS are you doing this on? Unixy stuff is probably good for C++ but if it's windows you'd probably be better off with C#.

Jon

I'm using Windows at work, but I want it to be fairly cross platform.

C# then It's my bread and butter so can probably help out more than something I havent used in years

Grab Mono, there is a standalone IDE if you can't get Visual Studio (MonoDevelop) and sortof like Java when you have the VM installed (JVM equivalent is the CLR or common language runtime IIRC) it will run the same

Reason for using Mono libs where possible is some C# libs actually p/invoke MS C++ libraries not available (Entity framework does this). The reflection library (Cecil) is IMO superior to the standard .Net one too