In my prior post, I described my daring quest of gaining admission to the Electronics Engineering program. We had to stay at my father’s friend’s house because the admissions procedure had been postponed until the next day. There, I discovered an excellent C++ book called C++ Program Design by Cohoon and Davidson.
There were several C++ books available on the market. What set it apart was that it came with a CD containing a library called EzWindows that included object oriented APIs for creating simple GUI programs for Windows. After my unsuccessful attempts at learning VC++ , I had been looking for literature to learn OOP and GUI programming. This book provided both. I didn’t waste any time in buying this book.
The authors did an excellent job of introducing newcomers to OOP. The EzWindows library aided me in comprehending real-world applications of OOP and creating some enjoyable projects. I wish I had discovered this book sooner.
The library itself was rather small. You could draw simple shapes and text. Some mouse events were supported, and later in the book there was a bug squashing game. The only thing it lacked was the ability to accept user input via a graphical user interface. Using the examples in the book, I constructed a maze traversal program that looked like this.
It was basically invoked from the command line. It read data from a text file and navigated a graphical maze. It was a lot of fun!! The book helped me comprehend OOP and enhanced my knowledge of C++; it was one of the greatest books I’ve ever read!
