A Book for Learning C++

In early 2023 I started working on the idea for a book that would teach C++ (truly ground breaking, I know /s). I had written a digital book called "High Performance Programming" used to teach some of C++'s parallelism primitives to my peers in the student team I was a part of but it had many flaws in its approach to exploring language concepts and was largely created by cobbling together a series of slide decks and a handful of markdown notes.

In making the HPP, I learnt about a tool called mdbook which could turn markdown into a website with the feel of a book. I had learnt about it while learning a bit of Rust and really enjoyed the flow and structure the book gave to learning the language. I used mdbook to create HPP as a book and started planning a deeper dive into creating a guide to C++ as a whole.

Well, that was the intention. Instead my duties in the student team took priority and I took the mdbook technique for educational content and lead the effort to completely rewrite the HPC branch's training material for the student team. This was a great opportunity to refine how I thought about making educational content.

I didn't pick up the C++ Book project until September of 2023 and starting mapping out the content I wanted to explore and started porting the nitty-gritty content from the HPC-Training Book I had helped write; such as installing compilers and tools etc., and making it work for this new book.

Alas, life and studies delayed proper focus on this leading to constant revision of the early chapters as I tried to re-situate my mind in whatever I was up to month earlier when i last restarted.

Which leads us to early 2026, exactly three years since I made the first commit and there still no book. I have ironed out a lot of the early chapters and have a pretty good idea of the content that I want to write, which cut way down from the naive initial plan I had and is way more focused on the basics. Hopefully I can some parts here and there over this year, although it being final year of university might not allow it.

Update (02-07-2026): Haven't touched the book since February lol.