Preface

Gosh, but this book is short. I mean, wow. My C++ Primer is 1237 pages counting the index, title, and dedication pages. This one weighs in at 276 ?in boxing terms, we're talking bantamweight.

The first question, of course, is how come? Actually, there's a story to that.

I'd been pestering everyone at Disney Feature Animation for a number of years to let me work on a production. I asked directors, management types ?even Mickey, if the truth be told. In part, it was for the glamour, I suppose. Hollywood. The big screen. Also, I hold a Master of Fine Arts as well as my Comp Sci degree, and film work seemed to promise some sort of personal synthesis. What I told management, of course, was that I needed the experience in production in order to provide usable tools. As a compiler writer, I'd always been one of my own main users. It's difficult to get defensive or feel unfairly criticized when you're one of the principal complainers about your software.

The computer effects lead on the Firebird segment of Fantasia 2000 was interested in having me join the production. To kind of try things out, he asked me to write a tool to read the raw Disney camera information for a scene and generate a camera node that could be plugged in to the Houdini animation package. I wrote it in C++, of course. It worked. They liked it. I was invited to come on board.

Once on the production (thanks to Jinko and Chyuan), I was asked to rewrite the tool in Perl. The other TDs, it was explained, weren't heavy-duty programmers but knew Perl, Tcl, and so on. (TD is film industry jargon for technical director. I was the segment's software TD. There was also a lighting TD [hi, Mira] and a model TD [hi, Tim] as well as the actual computer effects animators [hi, Mike, Steve, and Tonya].) And oh, by the way, could I do this quickly, because, gosh, we have a proof of concept test to get out that the directors (hi, Paul and Gaetan) and effects supervisor (hi, Dave) are waiting for to pitch to the then head of Feature Animation (hi, Peter). No emergency, you understand, but ...

This left me in somewhat of a quandary. I can program reasonably quickly in C++ with confidence. Unfortunately, I didn't know Perl. I thought, OK, I'll read a book. But it can't be too big a book, at least not right now. And it had better not tell me too much, although I know I should know everything, only later. After all, this is show biz: The directors need a proof of concept, the artist needs a plug-in to prove the concept, and the producer ?heck, she needs a 48-hour day. I didn't need the best book on Perl ?just the right book to get me going and not steer me too far off the righteous path.

I found that book in Learning Perl, by Randal Schwartz. It got me up and running, and it was fun to read. Well, as much as any computer book is fun. It leaves out gobs of good stuff. At the time, though, I didn't need all that stuff ?I needed to get my Perl scripts working.

Eventually, I realized sadly that the third edition of C++ Primer could no longer fill a similar role for someone needing to learn C++. It had just become too big. I think it's a grand book, of course ?particularly with Josée Lajoie coming on board as coauthor of the third edition. But it's too comprehensive for this kind of just-in-time C++ language learning. That's why I decided to write this book.

You're probably thinking, but C++ is not Perl. That's correct. And this text is not Learning Perl. It's about learning C++. The real question is, How does one shed almost a thousand pages and still claim to be teaching anything?