P Hi everyone it been awhile.  
Picked up a free C++ book at the dump the other day and my son is starting to play around with it.  
The book says we need a compiler and a editor.  Went searching and came up with a bunch of them but I do not know if anyone will do or do you need a special one for gamming.  
Is there anyone you guys recommend better than others.  
Free is very important in this decision!

Thanks
Sir Bors.

well that is not quite so simple to answer
do you want a whole IDE? then i would suggest you check out the eclipse Cpp version
if you just want a good text editor with syntax highlighting id suggest notepad++
its a matter of personal preferance. but i think to start off with i would go with a plain editor ie notepad++
http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/

as for a compiler, im not sure where you will get a good and free c++ compiler. i might have time to have a look arround later.

but on a further note if your starting with programming why not start with Java, as java is imho much easyer to learn than c++
and java is much younger and is im gonna lean out of the window very far now, more popular by now.

At the moment my son is just kink of opening the book and wants to start learning. I am not sure how far in is going to go with this.  So what ever the book tells him to do at first is what he will do.  

Now I am assuming that gaming is one of the things he would be working towards and I thought all the games are in C++.  Is that the case or not?  

Now the C++ book was free at the dump,  I would have to go out and buy a Java book.

My son asked me if this was a good C++ book.  And I said I do not know but it was free and that makes it good enough at the moment.

One more question you typed 'imho'.  I am not always up on shorthand typing and was wondering what that means?

Thank-you
Sir Bors.

Quote (Sir_Bors @ May 27 2005, 1:29 pm)

One more question you typed 'imho'.  I am not always up on shorthand typing and was wondering what that means? Thank-you Sir Bors.

in my honest opinion

I'm pretty sure it USUALLY means in my 'humble' opinion...  More of a "this is just my thought" than "this is what I really (honestly) think..."  But Flix can clear that up.

Anyway, yeah, C++ is usually used for games, but it's on the difficult side.

well seriously befor anybody gets close to programming even a tetris with C++ he has alot of SERIOUS work ahead of him.

and games used to be mainely in C++ but nowadays they can be made in pretty much any language as nowadays PCs are all fast enough even for not quite so fast languages.
i think nowadays alot of games are C#, VB or similar.

it doesnt realy make a difference.

anyway
if your son realy wants to learn to program he should learn software engeneering before the actual coding, that would make him a much more efficiant programmer later

Learning C is a good starting point before learning C++ or Java.

A good free compiler is GCC, which has been ported to Windows by cygwin.
http://www.cygwin.com/

Free download of Thinking in Java, 3rd Edition:
http://www.mindview.net/Books/TIJ/

And yeah IMHO means in my humble opinion.

no dont learn C, C isnt even object orientated

take teh BIG advantage of learning an OOP language FIRST!

Thanks everyone.  My son is just fooling around with it at the moment anyway.  He was interested in seeing how it works etc.  I assume that if he really gets interested in something like this he would have to go to college or something like that.
At the moment I do not want to discourage him from looking into things.

Sir Bors.

Quote (Sir_Bors @ May 28 2005, 5:26 am)

At the moment I do not want to discourage him from looking into things.

definately
and if he realy wants to he can learn programing by himself.