You do not have to learn all of C++ at once.

01 / RECOMMENDED

Build a working mental model

Twenty-five to forty minutes a day, seven sessions. Stop and change the code if you cannot answer the exercise.

1. Objects, storage, and lifetime → Pointers and references: say who owns the object and when a handle dies.
2. RAII → Choosing smart pointers: release resources without manual cleanup.
3. Construction and destruction order → Copying and the Rule of Zero: copy a value versus copy a resource handle.
4. Move semantics → Perfect forwarding: explain why std::move does not move by itself.
5. vector → Iterator invalidation: decide which handles survive a container update.
6. Mutexes and locks → Memory ordering: draw the happens-before relation for a published value.
7. Compilation and linking → Diagnostics: compile, change the example, and explain every warning.

02 / INTERVIEW REHEARSAL

Practice saying a complete answer.

Reserve 60–90 minutes. For each prompt, speak for 60 seconds: conclusion, mechanism, boundary, example. A memorized definition is not enough.

1. new and malloc, const, static: storage, object lifetime, linkage, and scope.
2. Virtual functions and the object model, Virtual destructors: do not promote one ABI layout into a language rule.
3. shared_ptr, weak_ptr: control blocks, cycles, and the thread-safety boundary.
4. Hash containers, Ordered containers, Algorithms: complexity, degeneration, invalidation, comparators.
5. volatile, Condition variables: a data race is not “a wrong value sometimes”; waits belong around a predicate.

03 / MODERNIZE YOUR C++

Already comfortable with C++11? Add the later tools.

Twenty to thirty-five minutes each, in dependency order. Each lesson marks the minimum example standard.

1. auto and decltype → lambda → Variadic templates and fold expressions.
2. Type traits → Compile-time evaluation → concepts and requires.
3. optional and variant → string_view and span → ranges.
4. Coroutines → C++23 and expected. Check your library and compiler first.

04 / READ THE SOURCE

Trace one claim back to real book pages.

Open book records, check the edition and the actual reading range, then open the original. One theme at a time: read the source, run the original practice program, change an input, explain the result. A partial reading record is not coverage of the whole book.

All book practice lessons →

05 / OSTEP

Three easy pieces, one chapter at a time.

The OSTEP walkthrough follows the free book: CPU virtualization, memory virtualization, concurrency, persistence, then security. Run the C example on Linux before you mark a chapter done. Link the official PDF rather than treating these notes as the book.

Start the OSTEP walkthrough →