what to read or where to go next

[acorn]

As of late Im beginning to feel lost in the language. Ive gone over enough where I find myself skimming over large amounts of material I already know in books, Yet more advanced books seem to hard. I cant find any middle ground to anything. All I can do is look at what my weakness's are and work on that and then move on to the next. I know there is still alot of basic stuff with classes ive never done. I wish I could find a book where all the examples were classes and showing me stuff from there.

[muratagenc]

this is my second attempt to complete my studies on C++.
at first attempt, I did learn a lot, but got stuck right after polymorphism.
then I realized that I was just passing by virtual functions, without understanding properly.
yes, I did jump from book to book. I got 6 books in my shelf...

so, what I can tell you from my experience;
1. don't skip any theory without understanding. even it's a small piece of theory, it will be a part of a bigger picture. so, not to fail with the complex ones, understand the little guys.
2. dont just pass a chapter by understanding and typing codes from book. it doesn't work like that for me. you should do solve problems in the book. also, try to fix others code here. it really does help. without practice, it's like learning swimming from books, you will be drawn with your perfect knowledge.. (I did that when I was at middle school. "learned swimming from a book, and ended up in hospital :) seriously :)
3. also scan through the other forum sections here. even in this beginner section, there are advanced topics, like templates. read them, if you have no idea, wait until you learn it from the book. if you do have a clue, try to involve.

books are not the ultimate keys, not always. forums, tutorials on the net worth thousands of books (in many cases).

[acorn]

thanks thats good advice. this website has pointed out alot of things for me as well. one of things was pointers to char arrays. It actually took me a long time to learn the ins and out of char because ive always blown it off in favor of string class. it was only recently I sat down and really went through it.

[muratagenc]

especially with char arrays, one of the books I read was advising to write my own, for example, strcpy function. I did. playing with pointers, arrays, for a real, working purpose, helped me a lot. what I actually like to do, is to find "the best, fastest and shortest algorithm" for the job.
I used to sit and start typing immediately, but now, I'm like "hold on a sec, how should I handle this, what's the best way, what is the purpose, is speed a requirement, do I have enough space for code, what do they want me to do exactly?". coding part is just paperwork. I think the most challenging part is finding the right algorithm, I think that makes many people happy. not just coding.
oh, another thing, you can join those meetup.com groups. that's fun. being with people like yourself, just cool and encouraging.

[Intrexa]

When skimming over material you think you know, don't see if you understand the example, go to the end of the chapter, and try and do one of the harder, more involved exercises. If you can't do that, then you don't really know the content in the chapter.