Brian Kraut wrote:
>
> I had planned on learning C++ a while ago so I could write general PC
> software for various things (data logging, various interfaces to PIC
> projects, machinery alarm and monitoring, etc.).  After reading the
> first few chapters of a book several times over the last 6 months I
> realized that someone who works 60 hours a week, designs and sells PIC
> products on the side, has a family and almost no free time, and only
> will program occasionally will never learn C++.  I was thinking of
> trying VB.  What if anything will I loose by using VB instead and is it
> a lot easier to learn than C++?


Forget C++ and get a book on C. C will perform much better
for interface applications, and if you are familiar with
low-level stuff like PICs you will find C pretty easy.

Inheritance and Polymorphism might be nice for people
writing slow clunky things like windows, but if you want
to drive the chips and video and ports in your PC to
max performance you need simple if/else branching and
for statements. C was originally designed as a fairly low
level language that would compile into fast code but
be slightly easier to use than assembler. Turning it into
C++ (and then trying to make that the standard!) was
one of the dumb moves in computing history. Keep a high
performance language high performance I say.

I have a couple of books on C++ and they seem to focus on
the object oriented stuff way too much, when all you really
need to understand is somthing like this:

if(x>0)  do_stuff();
else     do_other_stuff();

:o)
-Roman

PS. A good book is "Learning Turbo C", any instruction
from older years will be better. Also there are some good
freeware C tutorials on the net if you search.

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