This article is aimed at readers at a more advanced level of understanding of the C++ language, and assumes familiarity with C++'s object oriented capabilities, as well as some understanding of the Standard Template Library. This article is intended for anybody who wishes to explore new techniques of object oriented software design and problem solving. The example shown takes a fairly common programming problem and completely re-factors the 'traditional' structured procedural solution into an object-oriented solution.

Conditional control statements are at the very core of programming, in almost any language. The idea behind conditional control is that it allows you to control the flow of the code that is executed based on different conditions in the program, input taken from the user, the internal state of the machine the program is running on, etc. Computers are very good at doing exactly what you tell them to do, but otherwise they are really quite stupid. However, imbuing them with the ability to make decisions through the use of conditional control can make them just a wee bit smarter – they start making the decisions that you tell them to. There are three major structures related to the conditional execution of code in C/C++ - the if statement, the if-else statement, and the switch-case statement. Each will be covered here. It is also possible to use looping structures, such as for-loops and while/do-while loops to conditionally execute code. However, they are covered in another tutorial, so I will not address them here.

Many people still think that printf and scanf belongs to C while cout and cin belongs to C++ and so they avoid using printf and scanf while writing programs in C++. Of-course you cant do this viceversa but depending on the design of your program you should use printf and cout accordingly. This is because printf though cryptic and complex in it's nature takes up a lot fewer bytes than what cout hogs up. This is exactly what this article does. This Article will show you which function is better under a certain situation.

So, I'm writing this tutorial for those who might want to take a more 'traditional' introduction to graphics, instead of taking the more common direct3d/opengl approach. As a warning, this is not a tutorial in 'C'. However, if you're familiar with java, php, jscript, or some other language that has a similar syntax, you should be fine. However, you may want to keep a c tutorial handy.