Working through 2nd edition of Discovering Modern C++

It has been a while since I’ve wrote C++ code or any serious code, as a matter of a fact, being busy finishing my mathematics studies. As my graduate studies are almost over, after some reflection on what I want do when they are over, I have decided to get back to programming.

I had some experience with several languages C, C++, C#, F#, Java, Kotlin and Python, and played a little with OCaml and Haskell during my flirting attempts with programming, however I have decided that I should stop chasing languages, pick one (okay may be two or three, but not more than that for now) and focus on other things. I am a bit grown up and have some programming experience, easy to learn/cleanly designed/fun to use were not my main concerns for focusing on the language – as I my goal was to use my programming in future work and/or research, I needed to learn the languages commonly used in the domains that interest me, which are mathematical software, high performance computing, machine learning and statistics… and I still have hopes to make games one day (I have few great ideas… at least I think they are great). There are few options available, but C and C++ is still the language that makes most of these work behind the scenes (Rust is cool, but it is not ready in my opinion yet and so is Julia) and I had some experience with these two. So I decided to pick with C++.

I needed a refresher book (I like books) which would also be somehow updated to the recent standards – C++17/20. However it had to be short and to the point on one hand and cover enough material in (mostly) correct on the other. After some thinking I have decided that Discovering Modern C++, 2nd Edition by Peter Gottschling was right for me.

I am reading through middle of it, and I will write detailed review and summary after I am done reading it.