🚀 go-pugleaf

It's up to you whether you learn C or C++ first.
Anything you learn in C will apply to C++, so you
won't hurt yourself by learning C first.

A lot would depend on the book you choose.  Many
C++ books assume you know C.

**BUT**, whatever you do, ALWAYS use a C++ compiler,
even if you're programming in C.  C++ has much stronger
type-checking than C does, and it will catch many errors
that would cause your system to crash.  You may even find
bugs in your book's examples!

Because of this type-checking, C++ is an appropriate
language for beginning computer science students, and
it's used that way at some universities.  C is much more
difficult as a first language.

If you do C++, **DON'T** try to create your own classes,
particularly classes with dynamic data, until you understand
C pointers well.

But it's OK to use someone else's class libraries (such as
for strings or complex numbers or whatever).  And it's OK 
to do very simple classes.

Using someone else's well-designed classes is some of the
easiest programming you can do; writing your own non-
trivial classes is some of the hardest programming you can
do.

Finally, while it's true that neither C nor C++ have an
exponentiation operator, the standard library DOES come
with a function that does exponentiation.  While it makes
the syntax look a little funny, you can write anything you
can write in FORTRAN given the pow() function and a complex
number class.

In addition to the books already mentioned, 
I like the Waite Groups C Primer Plus and C++ Primer Plus
books.  I tried to use K & R once for a community college
class and changed texts the very next term.  The examples
are fabulous in K & R, but the text is overly terse for
many people.

The tutorials that come with the Microsoft compiler are,
IMHO, excellent.  BTW, it's MUCH  easier to use it under 
Windows than under DOS and the performance is really
quite good.

// Paul Johns