Should I learn C before learning C++?

Question

I visited a university CS department open day today and in the labs tour we sat down to play with a couple of final-year projects from undergraduate students. One was particularly good - a sort of FPS asteroids game. I decided to take a peek in the src directory to find it was done in C++ (most of the other projects were Java 3D apps).

I haven't done any C before but I have looked through some C code before. From what I saw in the .cpp code in this game it didn't look very different.

I'm interested in learning either C or C++ but will probably learn the other later on. Is there any advantage to me learning one before the other and if so, which one?

Answer 1

There is no need to learn C before learning C++.

They are different languages. It is a common misconception that C++ is in some way dependent on C and not a fully specified language on its own.

Just because C++ shares a lot of the same syntax and a lot of the same semantics, does not mean you need to learn C first.

If you learn C++ you will eventually learn most of C with some differences between the languages that you will learn over time. In fact its a very hard thing to write proper C++ because intermediate C++ programmers tend to write C/C++ instead of proper C++. That is true whether or not you started with C or started with C++.

If you know C first, then that is good plus to learning C++. You will start with knowing a chunk of the language. If you do not know C first then there is no point focusing on a different language. There are plenty of good books and tutorials available that start you from knowing nothing and will cover anything you would learn from C which applies to C++ as well.

Please see further reasoning in this answer.

Answer 2

In the process of learning C++ you will learn most of C as well. But keep in mind a lot of C++ code is not valid C. C++ was designed to be compatible with C code, so i'd say learn C++ first. Brian wrote a great answer regarding this.

Answer 3

C is the basis of a lot of wonderful tools we all use. It's quite simple and its definite guide - white bible - is a must-read. As for C++, I agree with Linus - "C++ is a horrible language." - so there's no need to learn it, before or after you learn C.

Answer 4

No there is no compulsion but i think C++ is easier

Answer 5

No.

It's generally more useful to learn C++ because it's closer to the most modern OO-based languages, like Eiffel or (in an inferior way) C#.

If your goal is to learn C++, learn modern, standard C++ in the first place. Leave the mallocs aside.

Answer 6

I love this question - it's like asking "what should I learn first, snowboarding or skiing"? I think it depends if you want to snowboard or to ski. If you want to do both, you have to learn both.

In both sports, you slide down a hill on snow using devices that are sufficiently similar to provoke this question. However, they are also sufficiently different so that learning one does not help you much with the other. Same thing with C and C++. While they appear to be languages sufficiently similar in syntax, the mind set that you need for writing OO code vs procedural code is sufficiently different so that you pretty much have to start from the beginning, whatever language you learn second.

Answer 7

C is a must know language for software engineering. C++, Java, python, are not. You should learn it first without a doubt.

Answer 8

Here is an alternate phrasing of your questions, "should I learn VB6 before I learn VB.NET?".

Answer 9

Having observed people, who have learned Java first, struggle with the concepts of pointers and memory management in C++, I'd say that learning C first is a good idea, in order to grasp these two concepts, isolated from the complexities of other C++ features.

Answer 10

Some C++ books supposes that the reader have minimal knowledge on C, but whoever language you choice isn't wrong way, because lots of programming languages are partial based on C/C++ and for future learning other languages will be little bit easier.

Answer 11

Like the answers to many other questions in life, it depends. It depends on what your programming interests and goals are. If you want to program desktop applications, perhaps with a GUI, then C++ (and OOP) is probably a better way to go. If you're interested in hardware programming on something other than an x86 chipset, then C is often a better choice, usually for its speed. If you want to create a new media player or write a business app, I'd choose C++. If you want to do scientific simulations of galaxy collisions or fluid dynamics, behold the power of C.

Answer 12

Learning C forces you to think harder about some issues such as explicit and implicit memory management or storage sizes of basic data types at the time you write your code.

Once you have reached a point where you feel comfortable around C's features and misfeatures, you will probably have less trouble learning and writing in C++.

It is entirely possible that the C++ code you have seen did not look much different from standard C, but that may well be because it was not object oriented and did not use exceptions, object-orientation, templates or other advanced features.

Answer 13

I think you should learn C first, because I learned C first. C gave me a good grasp of the syntax and gotchas with things like pointers, all of which flow into C++.

I think C++ makes it easy to wrap up all those gotchas (need an array that won't overflow when you use the [] operator and a dodgy index? Sure, make an array class that does bounds checking) but you need to know what they are and get bitten by them before you understand why things are done in certain ways.

When all is said and done, the way C++ is usually taught is "C++ is C with objects, here's the C stuff and here's how all this OO stuff works", so you're likely to learn basic C before any real C++ if you follow most texts anyway.

Answer 14

If you decide to learn both (and as other people have mentioned, there's no explicit need to learn both), learn C first. Going from C to C++ feels like a natural progression; going the other way feels like deliberately tying one hand behind your back. :-)

Answer 15

I'm going to disagree with the majority here. I think you should learn C before learning C++. It's definitely not necessary, but I think it makes learning C++ a lot easier. C is at the heart of C++. Anything you learn about C is applicable to C++, but C is a lot smaller and easier to learn.

Pick up K&R and read through that. It is short and will give you a sufficient sense of the language. Once you have the basics of pointers and function calls down, you can move on to C++ a little easier.

Answer 16

I think as I'm still 'roughly' new to programming I'm going to learn C first - I get the impression that this will help me get a better grasp over the 'concepts' of C, which I can expand upon when I come to learn C++.

Answer 17

I think learning C first is a good idea.

There's a reason comp sci courses still use C.

In my opinion its to avoid all the "crowding" of the subject matter the obligation to require OOP carries.

I think that procedural programming is the most natural way to first learn programming. I think that's true because at the end of the day its what you have: lines of code executing one after the other.

Many texts today are pushing an "objects first" approach and start talking about cars and gearshifts before they introduce arrays.

Answer 18

I learned C first, and I took a course in data structures which used C, before I learned C++. This has worked well for me. A data structures course in C gave me a solid understanding of pointers and memory management. It also made obvious the benefits of the object oriented paradigm, once I had learned what it was.

On the flip side, by learning C first, I have developed some habits that initially caused me to write bad C++ code, such as excessive use of pointers (when C++ references would do) and the preprocessor.

C++ is really a very complex language with lots of features. It is not really a superset of C, though. Rather there is a subset of C++ consisting of the basic procedural programming constructs (loops, ifs, and functions), which is very similar to C. In your case, I would start with that, and then work my way up to more advanced concepts like classes and templates.

The most important thing, IMHO, is to be exposed to different programming paradigms, like procedural, object-oriented, functional, and logical, early on, before your brain freezes into one way of looking at the world. Incidentally, I would also strongly recommend that you learn a functional programming language, like Scheme. It would really expand your horizons.