The Beginner’s Quick Guide to Learning & Writing C / C++

This is going to be a brief, simple, and quick guide to starting to learn the basics of the languages C and C++ for absolutely no cost at all, as a lot of people run into dilemmas about which learning gateway(s) to choose based on the difficulty/learning curve each of them provide. You will find this post very helpful if you have just made up your mind about learning either C or C++ and are looking for a good start.

Learning C / C++

I would strongly recommend enrolling to the courses from the links given below, because it is absolutely free, has chapter—wise very well—explained video lessons, short marked quizzes at the end of the videos, revision of previous lessons, Q&As, notes, examples, PowerPoint presentations, and a free online certificate of completion upon finishing the particular course.

Click to learn C (outdated / removed)
Click to learn C++

Upon clicking on any of the above links, you will be greeted by the course page, and when you choose to enroll for the course, you’ll be asked to register. Go ahead with the registration, it is a very quick process, and then sign-in. You’re done! You can start learning right away!

Writing, testing, and running C / C++ code

To write, test, and run codes in C / C++, development environments (programs that you write programs in) are used. One of the most widely used development environments by beginners and new learners is Turbo C++

Turbo C++ is an integrated development environment for Windows. In more basic terms, Turbo C++ lets you write, test, and run C and C++ programs that you write. It is outdated and there are a few other more significantly improved and updated development environments out there with vast capabilities and features (like CodeBlocks, DevC++, etc.) but as a beginner, there would be nothing easier to learn than Turbo C++ itself.

You can download Turbo C++ from here.

After downloading the .RAR, just extract it and run the “setup.exe” file, that’s all. It is very light, that is, it has very less requirements and will not cost you any performance or virtual resources either. After installing, run Turbo C++ and you will see a pretty basic window that looks something like this:

In the above image is an example of the most basic set of lines for the most basic code you can ever write, which is to simply display a word or line of text as you have input it.

A lot of examples and walkthroughs of Turbo C++ are shown in the above learning gateways in the videos. They helped me a lot in learning the entire basic concept of these languages. Give it a try yourself!

All the best, future coder!

Troubleshooting

In case you notice that your mouse clicks don’t register in the Turbo C++ terminal anymore even though you can still type and use all the keyboard shortcuts, follow my quick and simple little post here, and you’ll have it fixed in literally 1 second.