C & C++ programming notes

• Author: Ben Langmead

These are lecture notes and example code for teaching C & C++. The slides themselves are written in a custom "runnable Markdown" dialect for C/C++. These files have extension .cppmd. The script that "compiles" .cppmd files is units/cppmd_render.py. This script:

• Generates C/C++ source files based on specially-formatted comments in the Markdown (<!---cppmd-file ... -->)
• Runs shell commands based on specially-formatted comments in the Markdown (<!---cppmd-shell ... -->), often in order to compile and run the source code
  • Possibly integrates the output from the shell back into the slides, so that output can be included in final rendered doc
• Uses pandoc & beamer to render a PDF

Outputs consist of (a) a PDF of the slides, (b) source files for all the examples.

All the shell commands are run within a Docker image. We use this image from Docker Hub:

• benlangmead/fedora-cpp-slides

And the corresponding Dockerfile and scripts used to build/pull/push are available in the docker subdirectory. The base image is Fedora 27. The most relevant software versions are:

gcc-7.2.1
g++-7.2.1
gdb: Fedora 8.0.1-33.fc27
valgrind-3.13.0
git v2.14.3

Philosophy

The reality of programming in C and C++ can seem divorced from the conceptual discussions in texts. In these notes, explaining concepts is always intertwined with showing examples. When examples are shown, I give exact code and exact command lines, executed in a predictable environment, so that students can recreate the conditions exactly. I show examples that do work and others that don't. The idea is never to stray too far from a code example.