AI Assisted C and C++ Programming

From the preface

A coding agent can now write the first assignment of a C course faster than a student can read the assignment. It can write the second one too, and the tenth. The programs compile, they pass the tests an instructor would write in week three, and many of them are correct. I wrote this book because of what that does to the meaning of a working program.

When I sat down to plan the programming course I had agreed to teach, I gave the first assignment to a coding agent before I gave it to anyone else. It came back in under a minute: tidy, commented, free of warnings, and passing every test I had written for it. The question I asked myself was not whether the program was right. It was what a grade on that program would tell me about the student who turned it in.

Contents

Front matter: Preface · How to Use This Book · Setting Up Your Workbench.

1. Part I. Foundations
   1. From Python to C: What Python Was Hiding
   2. The Working Loop
2. Part II. C and the Machine
   3. Control Flow, Functions, Recursion, and Counting Operations
   4. Pointers
   5. Arrays, Strings, and Matrices: n, n², n³
   6. The Stack and the Heap: Dynamic Memory and Ownership
   7. Structs, Headers, and Multi-File Programs
   8. Growable Arrays and Linked Lists: The Cost of Growth
   9. Files, Bits, and Function Pointers: ADTs Behind a Header
3. Part III. Cost and the First Delegation
   10. Complexity and Sorting: Your First Delegation
   11. Specify First: Abstract Data Types
4. Part IV. C++ and Objects
   12. Moving to C++: Is It Really C++?
   13. Classes, Invariants, and Operator Overloading
   14. Resource Ownership: RAII, the Rules of Zero, Three, and Five, and Smart Pointers
   15. Inheritance, Polymorphism, and Composition: Reviewing an Agent's Design
5. Part V. Generic Code, Data Structures, and Agent Teams
   16. Templates and the Standard Library
   17. Binary Search Trees
   18. Hash Tables, Exceptions, and the Search Study
   19. Directing a Team of Agents
   20. A First Look at Concurrency

Back matter: Appendix A, Audit Report Template · B, Agent Traps by Chapter · C, Tutor Prompt and Prompt Patterns · D, Sanitizer, Valgrind, and gdb Card · E, Work-Log Template · F, Oral-Defense Question Bank · G, PAs and Labs at a Glance · Glossary · Bibliography · Index.

The book's sibling is AI Assisted Software Engineering by the same author.