I worked through one of his lecture series, I think it was this one but it was a while ago so I'm not 100% sure looking at the link. The focus was on algorithms which is why the "components" in the title is throwing me off a bit.
The series I watched was excellent though! Highly recommended, it's a lot of the same material as his book Elements of Programming but I found it more accessible in the lecture format.
His notes on programming are very well written. I recently stumbled upon them. Reading the rotate and partition sections were real eye-openers! Highly recommended http://stepanovpapers.com/notes.pdf
Yes! Alexander Stepanov is fantastic. He's the designer of the Standard Template Library (STL) for C++, which is C++'s core library of generic algorithms. It's part of the standard libary.
If you can understand how to use the STL properly, you're well on your way to becoming a profiicent C++ programmer.
It's a combination of history and math/algorithms and programming (using C++). If you're just looking for a straight intro to C++ course this isn't it. But it's a ton of fun and the generic programming/STL mindset is very powerful.
Programming Conversations is another great lecture series by Alexander Stepanov:
Sean Parent is very good at getting you in the STL mindset and showing off the expressive power of using the standard STL algorithms in your code. Except in the simplest cases, you should try to use them instead of writing your own loops.
Here are some random tips if you're coming from C or Java:
"new" is not the way to create objects in C++. new and delete should almost never be used by serious programmers in C++. Never use new and delete (or malloc and free). If you want a dynamically-allocated array, use the standard vector.
It's much easier to write C++ than it is to read it. This is because you can always write using a simple clear subset of C++ that you understand. Try to pick a style that you think as many people as possible will understand. Programming languages are for humans to read. I try to write code that I think C programmers can read.
Edit -- Another tip:
Exception safety isn't about C++'s exception-handling language feature. Exceptions still happen in C. There's just not a language feature that directly expresses them.
Writing exception-safe code is nearly impossible in C. RAII and C++'s built-in exceptions make it possible. If you're careful to always use RAII by default, you can get the basic exception safety guarantee automatically without thinking about it. And you can get the strong exception safety guarantee whenever you need it.
> It's much easier to write C++ than it is to read it. This is because you can always write using a simple clear subset of C++ that you understand. Try to pick a style that you think as many people as possible will understand. Programming languages are for humans to read. I try to write code that I think C programmers can read.
While I don't disagree with the sentiment (quite the contrary), if writing code that C programmers can easily read is the goal, using the STL is probably not the best idea.
Personally, while I'm very biased by my usecase for C++ (compute-bound performance sensitive numerical code), I quite enjoy writing code that's essentially C with function overloading, operator overloading and a few judiciously placed templates. I don't miss the STL, OOP, smart pointers and the rest, and the language suddenly seems much more concise and convenient, not to mention compile times are virtually instant and debug builds aren't unusably slow any more. YMMV, of course, everyone should pick the subset of C++ that suits their usecase and relevant constraints.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIHAEYyoTUc&list=PLHxtyCq_WD...