Important concepts you learn from a Programming Book

Question

Hello, I've been recently learning how to program and had read at least 1 full book to start learning. As the book taught C++, I wrote some small programs and applications to understand the concept, but wondered, what concepts are important?

Example is the "friend" in OOP, where source codes that I look at does not use this often, and I can not find any uses coming from this. While I see inheritance and polymorphism more important, and it being seen in many examples, as for personal uses.

The main question I believe I am saying is, is everything in the programming book or tutorial you learn important? and if so, what is more important and should be learn deeply, as the books I had looked at does not tell you much about?

Answer 1

When I initially started with C++, I found the concepts explained in this FAQ were really useful.

Answer 2

It surely depends on the subject you are trying to learn. Assuming that you are talking about books teaching programming languages, then the most important concept is to remember what stuff is there. Once you know that you are able to do "friend" in C++, you will be able to find it when you need it.

Another important "concept" is to be hands on with examples. This way you learn your way around with a language. Everyone uses its own subset of a language, especially in case of C++.

Answer 3

For most programmers the important concepts are the ones they get paid for.

For textbook authors it's the concepts that the schools ordering their textbooks want to teach.

For lecturers it's the ones to be tested on in the curriculum.

For computer scientists it's the one they judge important to intellectual foundations of the subject.

For non-textbook programming book authors, it's the concepts for which they think there is the greatest market for explanations of those concepts.

For open source or recreational programmers, it's the ones that make their day.

You can be pretty sure that for every concept in the book, someone thinks it's important.

Answer 4

Welcome to the club :)

Read this.

Answer 5

Part of the beauty of owning a collection of programming books is that when you come across something you recognize from one of the chapters, you can always go back and re-read that section to reaquaint yourself. In fact, I did the very same thing the first time I had to use the Business Data Catalog in a SharePoint site.

So its not so important that you worry about commiting something in the book to memory and you should look forward to opportunities to test some of the concepts the book touched on and compare your real-life experiences to those chapters. I think its only after making this return trip and coming out of it with more awareness about the material is a sign that you've picked up a really good book on the topic. And having the analogy from your work really helps the material stick a lot better than the exercises at the end of the chapter typically will.