You're a first-time programmer. You have a lot to learn!
Academics often describe programming concepts in theory but like to leave implementation to someone else, preferably someone from the industry. We don't do that in this book—in this book, we will describe the theory behind C++ concepts and implement our own game as well.
The first thing I will recommend is that you do the exercises. You cannot learn to program simply by reading. You must work with the theory with the exercises.
We are going to get started by programming very simple programs in C++. I know that you want to start playing your finished game right now. However, you have to start at the beginning to get to that end (if you really want to, skip over to Chapter 12, Spell Book, or open some of the samples to get a feel for where we are going).
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
Setting up a new project (in Visual Studio and Xcode)
Your first C++ project
How to handle errors
What are building and compiling?