3 Websites To Get Started With Learning C++ Programming Language

3 Websites To Get Started With Learning C++ Programming Language:
Learning to program can be difficult for many, even with relatively easy programming languages. While Java is easier to get started with (where we have numerous articles here at MakeUseOf for Java as well as Internet scripting languages and deciding which one to learn), C++ may not be.
However, those with some programming experience will find learning C++ less difficult than beginners, although there are plenty of good websites to teach yourself with.

Why Learn C++?

Why would you care to learn C++? It is a very powerful programming language which basically has a “trust the programmer” motto. While that stance also increases the chance for errors without the complier freaking out, it does give the programmer more flexibility in how they actually write their code.
Due to this, most programs are at least partially written in this language or its cousin, C. Learning C++ is also beneficial in another way – as C++ is very similar to C, you can understand and (for the most part) code in C as well.

LearnCpp.com

LearnCpp is a great place for both beginners and somewhat experienced programmers to get started with C++. The author of the site has very well written, thorough tutorials that literally cover every basic lesson (such as installing a good IDE, like my favorite Geany for Linux) to some pretty advanced stuff (such as the latest changes in the 2011 revision of C++).
Out of all the sites I list here, I recommend trying this one out first before all the others. The tutorials follow a very logical pathway that builds on previous tutorials as you go along. Additionally, after each lesson, the author offers you a quiz to see if you understood what the lesson was about, which I find fantastic.

CPlusPlus.com

CPlusPlus is another great website for learning C++. Although this website also has some tutorials, it is better used as a reference. There are multitudes of programming concepts that you can look up, which is very helpful when you want to use a certain technique but happen to get stuck.
This site may not be the absolute best for beginners, as its referential nature implies that it includes more jargon than LearnCpp.com would. However, the information included on the site is still very good and should be used as long as you understand what it says.

Cprogramming.com

In case the first two websites aren’t your cup of tea for whatever reason, maybe you’ll have a bit more luck with Cprogramming.com. This website also includes a well-written tutorial and other goodies you can definitely make use of. I just personally happen to prefer LearnCpp.com because I find the tutorials on that site a little easier to understand, and it’s easier to navigate between lessons as they’re more organized (again, my opinion). However, your opinion may not be the same as mine, so if this works better for you, use it!
The good thing about Cprogramming.com is the fact that it includes both tutorials for C++ as well as C, so you can learn both languages through tutorials written by the same author. This is great for drawing comparisons between the two languages, plus if you found learning C++ to be easier with this site, it will most likely be just as easy with the C tutorial.

Conclusion

Hopefully, armed with these three sites, you’ll be able to get a grasp on C/C++ and start writing your own programs. Just remember that as you get started, functionality should be the priority over appearance, so don’t feel like your program is worth nothing if it doesn’t have a GUI. The algorithms and other coding are what makes a program do what it’s supposed to do, and if it works, then great! Mission accomplished!
Let us know what sites you prefer in the comments below.
Image Credit: Internet background with binary code via Shutterstock

Create a beautiful and professional resume or CV with PDF CV

Create a beautiful and professional resume or CV with PDF CV:

PDF CV is a neat little free web-based program that will let you create a new CV or resume in PDF format and then download it to your system directly. It’s super simple, very easy to get the hang of, and costs nothing.
There’s been a lot of changes in the last twelve years. I suppose you can say that at pretty much any time in any year, but specifically I am speaking about language. We constantly, as a people and as a nation, change our colloquialisms, vernacular, and basic usage of nearly any term we want at nearly any moment with nearly no provocation, logic, or cause. That being the case, it came as no shock to me that the word ‘resume’ is no longer being used among the ‘cool’ people in the professional world.
I was never terribly fond of the word in the first place, the fact that it is French in origin not withstanding, but it did still take me a moment to get used to the idea of calling it a Curriculum Vitae instead. While I agree that sounds prettier, it’s also much more of a mouthful than it’s predecessor. Therefore, in the grandest modern tradition, it was decided unilaterally and unconsciously to just use initials. So, instead of a resume, you may need to start building a CV.

Now, a CV, I am told, varies from a resume in certain ways. What these ways actually are, and how they can be visually and physically exemplified, no one seems to know. At the very least, no one wants to tell me. So, in my mind, a resume and a CV are just the same, even if one might look or sound prettier than the other. Which is which is up to you. So, having decided that building a new CV could be a fun project, I set out to find some good freeware to do the trick.
I remember back in the covered wagon days when we used these programs called “word processors” to create and print resumes but like most things in that era those have apparently become defunct. It seems there is specialized software for pretty much everything these days, and to keep up, your various office suite programs just continue to add new templates and extensions. That’s just fine with me, but if you decide to use an outside program to build your CV, you may want to give PDF CV a try. It’s web-based, so there’s no software to download, and it’s also completely free so there’s no worry about cost. That’s a good thing, too, when you consider that most people needing to build a CV are probably watching every penny. Heck, even most of us who aren’t making a new CV still watch every penny these days.

So, once you have signed in to the site, which you can do with your Facebook, Google, or other existing account (or just make a whole new account), you’ll then begin building your new CV. Now, you have two basic options for doing this. You can either upload an existing CV or resume, and then see what PDF CV makes of it and how it can be improved, or you can begin building a brand new one just by filling in the boxes on the web forms. It really is that simple. Just fill in the boxes, and you’re done.
Personally, I did not have a previously saved CV or resume so I started a brand new one as an example for this article. I typed in very little actual information but as I moved through the different tabs on the menu, it was very evident that I could put in as much or as little detail as I wanted, from beginning to end. Once that was done, it was time to choose my ‘template’ which determined the overall look and feel of the CV. Currently there are three different templates on offer but the developer has promised more in the future. After the template is chosen, you can then download your CV result as a PDF file. This is handy because it seems to be that every single time I have been asked for a complete resume in an email or other online application, they have wanted it in PDF format. Most sites will offer a conversion utility but you never know how those will turn out so it’s a good idea to have your own, already made.

In conclusion, I would suggest this site for anyone who needs to make a resume, wants to make a CV, or is just looking to freshen up an existing one. It’s simple, fast, and free. What more do you need as recommendation? Until next time, my friends.
[Thanks go to user Panzer for letting us know about this service].
Check out PDF CV here.

Browse and listen to SoundCloud public files with ‘The Cloud Player’

Browse and listen to SoundCloud public files with ‘The Cloud Player’:

You may have heard about SoundCloud, a free cloud service that lets users upload audio files and access them online or on blogs and websites, and optionally grant public access to them. CloudPlayer, as you may have guessed, is an online player for SoundCloud that will let you browse and listen to publically shared audio files uploaded by users.
But don’t expect a music sharing style website like Grooveshark or Spotify. The folks at SouldCloud go to great lengths to prevent uploading of copyrighted material (they do this algorithmically, with a software that tries to identify copyrighted content). As a consequence, what you find in CloudPlayer is infinitely more interesting audio tracks that have either been created by the users, such as mixes and covers, or (more likely) relatively unknown or obscure audio files that have escaped SoundCloud’s automated copyright filter. Which is to say, audio files that are significantly more interesting than your typical music sharing site.
This is a fairly sophisticated player that will let you search for public tracks on SoundCloud. It can provide advanced filtering such as by genre or bpm. Moreover, if you log in with your Google account, it will (in theory) let you create and save playlists and share them with your friends. I say ‘in theory’ because when I tried, logging in with my Google ID the player broke down and stopped working, a bug which surely (hopefully) will soon be fixed. Note: the player would only run again after I cleared my cache.
Anyway, it’s definitely worth checking out.
Also, if you use (or would like to use) SoundCloud check out my recent review of Scup, a nifty SoundCloud desktop uploader.
Visit The Cloud Player here.

Log into your favorite websites automatically and securely with LoginCode

Log into your favorite websites automatically and securely with LoginCode:

LoginCode is a great little free program that will keep your passwords for all your favorite web sites protected, as well as automatically logging you into those sites when you visit them. It is simple to install, supremely easy to use, and quite useful to those of us with more than one or two passwords.
Note that this program stores your password database locally on your machine, and does not upload them or otherwise make them accessible online.
Lots of people seem to think they don’t need more than one or two passwords. I used to be one of them, long ago. I thought that if I used the same password for all my different accounts at different web sites on the internet, it would be simple and easy to remember it so I wouldn’t have to worry about being locked out of one of my own accounts. This plan was foolhardy, at best, and in the end result it did actually backfire on me. When my password was stolen by some very unscrupulous people, it led to a pretty immediate and devastating situation of identity theft. Anyone who has been through anything even remotely similar will tell you, it’s a very tough situation to deal with and can take years to get everything back.

So, as I was struggling with that issue, it occurred to me that if I had kept different passwords for the different sites it would have made the whole thing considerably more difficult to pull off. They might have gotten one or two of my accounts, maybe, but they wouldn’t have been able to steal my identity wholesale the way they did. At the very least it would have slowed them down to the point I might have been able to catch the problem and stop it before it became too difficult. Alas, hindsight is always much clearer than foresight, it seems.
After that whole episode I began keeping different passwords for different sites. Since I sign up for an average of about five or six new sites a week, however, this was rapidly becoming more cumbersome than helpful. I got to the point where I had more than forty different passwords and I was constantly looking them up on my hand written list, and forever using the “I forgot my password” links at those various sites. While I did think that this hassle was better than the hassle of having my accounts compromised and my identity stolen, I was still getting pretty annoyed with the whole thing and more than once I considered going back to the dark ages when there were no web sites to sign up for. Between Facebook, Subjot, Twitter, Flickr, etc. etc. etc. it seemed like I spent more time remembering and typing passwords than anything else.
Since that obviously wasn’t going to happen, I started looking into other options. There are lots of browser programs out there, and most of them will offer to save password and user name information for you. The main problem with this option, however, is that all your passwords are stored in the browser’s data, which makes it rather un-secure, as far as a hacker of any talent and determination is concerned. Having the passwords stored in your browser is almost like waving a big red flag at a bull while calling it’s mother an ugly cow. Yes, I know they are cows, but that doesn’t mean you should call them ugly. It’s just bad manners, not to mention stupid and possibly suicidal.
So, the other option is to use a third party program to manage your password and login information. Now, I did a review recently on a program called Dashlane that will do this for you, but Dashlane also has tons of other features and uses besides just locking down your passwords and user names, and additionally will store and provide acees to  passwords online, which some users will not want . If you don’t need all those other functions or options, it can be something of a pain to have to wade through them just to use the features you do want.

LoginCode is a small, free, simple and easy program to manage your various passwords. It keeps the information separate from your browser, secure and secret as they should be. Additionally, it will also automatically log you into those web sites as long as your information is still unchanged. If you do change your password and user name info, you will need to update LoginCode but that, like everything else, is very easy and quick.
The Verdict: If you have more than one or two accounts on the internet and you want to keep your passwords safe, LoginCode is a great way to do it. It’s free, it’s easy, and the development shows a lot of thought and care put into it. I use it myself, currently, and would recommend that you try it out at the very least. If it doesn’t mesh well with you or your system for some reason, you’ve not lost anything and you might just find that it makes your life easier.
[Thanks go to reader Panzer for letting us know about this program].
Get LoginCode here.

Send Text Messages From Your Browser With MightyText & MobiTexter [Android]

Send Text Messages From Your Browser With MightyText & MobiTexter [Android]:
One of the main differences between a phone call, text message and messenger bird is the so-called deadline of reply. That’s in an ideal world. In the real world, people forget their cellphones at home, or are prone to ignore them in favor of some other — more interesting, or more pressing — activity.
That’s one motive behind synchronizing text messages with your computer. The other is the ease of typing with an old-fashioned keyboard. Especially for people who use text messaging frequently and don’t want to spend half their lives hunched over tiny touch screens, this is invaluable.

MightyText – Seamless Google Chrome Integration

MightyText is a twofold application. The MightyText extension goes in your Google Chrome web browser, the MightyText application on your Android phone. With hardly 2 minutes worth of work, your Android messages finds a second home on your computer.
Right now, MightyText is only available on Google Chrome, but support for Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer is in the pipeline.

The MightyText extension button unfolds to show you your inbox, which is constantly kept in sync with your Android text messages. Even the messages that were not sent through MightyText. However, one of the more impressive feats of MightyText is its ability to import all pre-existing messages and contacts from your phone as well.

Although a Google Chrome extension doesn’t sound like the most accessible way to access your text messages, the MightyText message notifications go a long way to proving otherwise. Even when you’re using another application, a small pop-up will inform you of any new messages. This pop-up will not fade away, so there’s no chance of accidentally missing it. Of course, you can always disable this feature to make MightyText less invasive.

MobiTexter – Text from Any Browser, Anywhere

MobiTexter, too, is an Android application that lets you send text messages from your browser. This time, through a webpage instead of a browser extension. This way it’s not bound to any specific browser. Contrary to MightyText, MobiTexter has a very rudimentary interface. Among other things, MobiTexter does not create message threads, but shows all your messages in chronological order.

There’s a flip side to this coin. Having this light interface does wonders for its compatibility. When I say MobiTexter will run in almost any browser, it’s not an empty boast. In the screenshot above, you can see MobiTexter running on Dolphin HD, a third-party iPad browser. Texting with your tablet — even without 3G — is no harder than opening a webpage. With iOS, you could even put a separate icon on your homescreen.
This is what makes MightyText and MobiTexter such a killer team. With MightyText installed, you can manage your messages on your personal computer. MobiTexter, on the other hand, lets you do the same on any computer, or portable device, so you can use a decent keyboard to compose your messages, wherever you are.

Cost and Reliability

Both of these applications are available free of charge. Any SMS will be sent at your usual fee. However, because both applications use a data connection to communicate with your computer, additional 3G bandwidth may have to be taken into account.
If you use these applications for time-sensitive business, there’s another thing you have to take into account. Neither application is infallible, so it might take some time before your text message is actually sent, even though they are normally pushed to your device instantly.
Have you tried any of these apps before? Do you have a different suggestion? Let us know in the comments!
Image Credit : nokhoog_buchachon

3 Sites To Study The Roots Of Your Favorite Artists & Songs

3 Sites To Study The Roots Of Your Favorite Artists & Songs:
Life without music is a life that would be much less enjoyable for most of us. Even before smartphones and iPods, we were finding ways to listen to our favorite songs everywhere we go through classics like the Walkman. Some people just can’t be pulled off of their headphones or earbuds.
As we grow older, our musical tastes begin to transform and branch out a little more. At 22, I’m going through that phase. Once a fan of nothing but hip-hop, I’ve used the wonders of the Internet to find artists I appreciate in genres like jazz and electronic. One of the easiest ways to look into new music that may be down your alley is to do a little research and look through artists that you already like. To help out, I’ve got a few for you that might do the trick.

WhoSampled

WhoSampled is a website that specializes in verifying and indexing user submissions revealing songs that have sampled others. Samples are most prevalent in the hip-hop genre, but they’re common elsewhere.

I’ve gone on WhoSampled looking through songs while bored and I’ve left having new favorite songs and an interest in new types of music. When you hear the original piece of a sample from a song that you’re already in love with, there’s an instant connection. It feels good to know where your music is coming from.
WhoSampled covers not only samples, but remixes and covers as well.

Second Hand Songs

If WhoSampled tweaked your interest, Second Hand Songs goes by the same tune but more narrowly for cover songs. You’d actually be surprised how many hit songs weren’t pushed mainstream by the original artist. SHS will help you find the original cover song artist or covers of original songs.

A huge portion of the covers here have YouTube videos associated directly with them, for us visual people. You can also browse by new content or specific artists.
As we speak, the SHS database is sitting at 39,896 works, 188,787 performances, 2,459 samples and 50,255 artists. That’s a huge collection!

AllMusic

AllMusic (part of a network that also caters to movies and games) is a deep and complete website that gives the user a full experience on music news and information, and offers a multitude of ways to find brand new artists you may have never heard about.

AllMusic does a fantastic job of breaking down musical genres into subgenres that really let you isolate and pinpoint a particular area of interest. From there, there’s hundreds of new and unfound artists you may stumble upon.
One of their coolest features, in my opinion, is the way they associate music with moods. Through that page, you’re able to pair up music with the way you’re feeling, which completely changes the listening experience. It’s a really great idea.
Check out these other articles:

• 4 Alternative Apps To The iPhone Music App
• Find Free Music With Freemake Music Box [Windows]
• 5 Of The Best Websites To Watch The Latest HD Music Videos

Samples, remixes, covers! I’ve tried to cover it all for you and I really suggest that any honest music fan check these websites out. You don’t know what you’re missing. Last.fm and Pandora do a great job of calibrating your music for the ears, but sometimes hard, manual research is the best way to go.
Share more sites like these in the comments if you have any – I’d love to see.