Chapter 1. Getting Started

CONTENTS

Section 1.1 Writing a Simple C++ Program	2
Section 1.2 A First Look at Input/Output	5
Section 1.3 A Word About Comments	10
Section 1.4 Control Structures	11
Section 1.5 Introducing Classes	20
Section 1.6 The C++ Program	25
Chapter Summary	28
Defined Terms	28

This chapter introduces most of the basic elements of C++: built-in, library, and class types; variables; expressions; statements; and functions. Along the way, we'll briefly explain how to compile and execute a program.

Having read this chapter and worked through the exercises, the reader should be able to write, compile, and execute simple programs. Subsequent chapters will explain in more detail the topics introduced here.

Learning a new programming language requires writing programs. In this chapter, we'll write a program to solve a simple problem that represents a common data-processing task: A bookstore keeps a file of transactions, each of which records the sale of a given book. Each transaction contains an ISBN (International Standard Book Number, a unique identifier assigned to most books published throughout the world), the number of copies sold, and the price at which each copy was sold. Each transaction looks like

    0-201-70353-X 4 24.99 

where the first element is the ISBN, the second is the number of books sold, and the last is the sales price. Periodically the bookstore owner reads this file and computes the number of copies of each title sold, the total revenue from that book, and the average sales price. We want to supply a program do these computations.

Before we can write this program we need to know some basic features of C++. At a minimum we'll need to know how to write, compile, and execute a simple program. What must this program do? Although we have not yet designed our solution, we know that the program must

• Define variables

• Do input and output

• Define a data structure to hold the data we're managing

• Test whether two records have the same ISBN

• Write a loop that will process every record in the transaction file

We'll start by reviewing these parts of C++ and then write a solution to our bookstore problem.