Should I learn C before learning C++? [closed]

Question

There is no need to learn C before learning C++.

They are different languages. It is a common misconception that C++ is in some way dependent on C and not a fully specified language on its own.

Just because C++ shares a lot of the same syntax and a lot of the same semantics, does not mean you need to learn C first.

If you learn C++ you will eventually learn most of C with some differences between the languages that you will learn over time. In fact its a very hard thing to write proper C++ because intermediate C++ programmers tend to write C/C++.That is true whether or not you started with C or started with C++.

If you know C first, then that is good plus to learning C++. You will start with knowing a chunk of the language. If you do not know C first then there is no point focusing on a different language. There are plenty of good books and tutorials available that start you from knowing nothing and will cover anything you would learn from C which applies to C++ as well.

Please see further reasoning in this answer.

I love this question - it's like asking "what should I learn first, snowboarding or skiing"? I think it depends if you want to snowboard or to ski. If you want to do both, you have to learn both.

In both sports, you slide down a hill on snow using devices that are sufficiently similar to provoke this question. However, they are also sufficiently different so that learning one does not help you much with the other. Same thing with C and C++. While they appear to be languages sufficiently similar in syntax, the mind set that you need for writing OO code vs procedural code is sufficiently different so that you pretty much have to start from the beginning, whatever language you learn second.

I learned C first, and I took a course in data structures which used C, before I learned C++. This has worked well for me. A data structures course in C gave me a solid understanding of pointers and memory management. It also made obvious the benefits of the object oriented paradigm, once I had learned what it was.

On the flip side, by learning C first, I have developed some habits that initially caused me to write bad C++ code, such as excessive use of pointers (when C++ references would do) and the preprocessor.

C++ is really a very complex language with lots of features. It is not really a superset of C, though. Rather there is a subset of C++ consisting of the basic procedural programming constructs (loops, ifs, and functions), which is very similar to C. In your case, I would start with that, and then work my way up to more advanced concepts like classes and templates.

The most important thing, IMHO, is to be exposed to different programming paradigms, like procedural, object-oriented, functional, and logical, early on, before your brain freezes into one way of looking at the world. Incidentally, I would also strongly recommend that you learn a functional programming language, like Scheme. It would really expand your horizons.

If you decide to learn both (and as other people have mentioned, there's no explicit need to learn both), learn C first. Going from C to C++ feels like a natural progression; going the other way feels like deliberately tying one hand behind your back. :-)

I think you should learn C first, because I learned C first. C gave me a good grasp of the syntax and gotchas with things like pointers, all of which flow into C++.

I think C++ makes it easy to wrap up all those gotchas (need an array that won't overflow when you use the [] operator and a dodgy index? Sure, make an array class that does bounds checking) but you need to know what they are and get bitten by them before you understand why things are done in certain ways.

When all is said and done, the way C++ is usually taught is "C++ is C with objects, here's the C stuff and here's how all this OO stuff works", so you're likely to learn basic C before any real C++ if you follow most texts anyway.

I'm going to disagree with the majority here. I think you should learn C before learning C++. It's definitely not necessary, but I think it makes learning C++ a lot easier. C is at the heart of C++. Anything you learn about C is applicable to C++, but C is a lot smaller and easier to learn.

Pick up K&R and read through that. It is short and will give you a sufficient sense of the language. Once you have the basics of pointers and function calls down, you can move on to C++ a little easier.

In the process of learning C++ you will learn most of C as well. But keep in mind a lot of C++ code is not valid C. C++ was designed to be compatible with C code, so i'd say learn C++ first. Brian wrote a great answer regarding this.