   Where to go now?
  I have been reading through the Teach yourself c++ in 21 days book.  i have a basic understanding of the c++ language and i now wonder where do i go from here?i was thinking directx or allegro but i was wondering if i could have some other opinions   
Quote:Original post by nemesispoiI have been reading through the Teach yourself c++ in 21 days book.  i have a basic understanding of the c++ language and i now wonder where do i go from here?sHave you written, compiled and ran any programs yet?Any not in that book?;  Don't jump into DirectX. It's only going to frustrate you if you don't understand C++ (and 3D math) pretty thoroughly. Instead, look into text games or simple 2D graphics. SDL is a popular option for the latter.   ;  sdl looks good.  another question: when do you use pointers in game programming?   ;Quote:Original post by nemesispoisdl looks good.  another question: when do you use pointers in game programming?SDL is pretty decent.  May I recommend Lazy Foo Tutorials.  These tutorials are pretty good and you can get up and running quickly.Regarding pointers: you will not survive in programming if you cannot be bothered to read, on the first page, in this forum, a post entitled,  Use of pointers?(C++).  Look around, man!   ;  a question about classes:when youre making a class, i know you have private and public functions. why do you need private functions? couldnt you just make everything public?   ;  Also take a look at SFML-dev.org . It's similar to SDL but more modern and built for C++. Very easy to get up and running.   ;  You could make everything public. In fact, many languages don't differentiate between private and public -- everything is public, all the time. As a general rule, though, you should keep private anything that someone using the class shouldn't need to know about. For example, say you have a homemade string class that uses several char arrays chunked together. Someone using the string class doesn't need to know how it's implemented; they just need to be able to print strings, combine strings, get characters, et cetera. So you'd make your char arrays private. The big win here is that later you can go back and decide to change how your string class works on the interior, and nothing will break, because nobody's able to access those char arrays you were using. If they'd been public, though, you don't have that guarantee, so it's no longer safe to change your internal mechanism.This is called Information Hiding, if you'd like to read more on the subject.   