I have been reading Bjarne Stroustrup’s A Tour of C++ and the language feels like a totally new language since my last project in C++ which was years ago. Since, (re-)learning a language requires both reading and writing code, I decided to work through some exercises on Exercism.

For C++, Exercism encourages a test-driven approach to solving problems and requires some tooling support (CMake) to focus on solving the problem instead of wasting time on setting up a build system for each exercise. I wasn’t familiar with either.

For both test-driven development (TDD) basics and familiarizing myself with CMake, I found working through (typing out the code from) the slides of Test-Driven Development in C++ by Richard Thomson very useful. In fact, it looks like Richard is the one behind the C++ track of Exercism, according to the description of a recent CppCast episode. It took me a couple of hours yesterday and coding C++ in a modern text editor like Atom was joyful (though it will take time for its packages to mature). I am yet to squash some remaining bugs and make all tests pass before my first submission on Exercism.

If one is looking to quickly brush up on C++, I find this combination of quickly learning the most important language features through a K&R style book and working through some exercises pretty efficient. YMMY.

Note: Many posts in this publication will be in the form of personal log entries, like this one, living up to the description “web log of a geek”. I post these publically online for my personal reference and, in case, others find them useful.