Dr. Will Briggs, an associate professor of computer science, has published his coding textbook titled “C++ for Lazy Programmers: Quick, Easy, and Fun C++ for Beginners.” Briggs finished the textbook while he was on sabbatical from the University of Lynchburg last fall.
“I wrote this book because I wasn’t happy with any of the introductory textbooks for C++ that I’ve ever seen,” Briggs said. “I wanted it to be fun, and the [textbooks] I had found before then were not fun. They were very serious.”
Briggs’s textbook is meant to engage readers in its content through humor and creative projects. Simple, step-by-step instructions make it easy to read and follow along, Briggs said, so virtually anyone can learn to code.
“The essential aspect to the style of it is that if it’s fun to read it, you’ll read it,” he explained. “If it’s not fun to read, and you force yourself to read it, your eyes start to glaze over and it just doesn’t work as well. It’s meant to be enjoyable to read.”
Not only is the textbook fun to read, he added, but coders of any skill level will benefit from the content. The book starts off with simple coding projects and gets more complex with each chapter.
“In almost the [entire] first half of the book there’s a lot of graphics, and it culminates in making an arcade game,” he said. “And then, because there’s more to life than making graphics, the rest of the textbook doesn’t use graphics as it goes into the higher-level concepts.”
Briggs has taught at the University of Lynchburg since 1998. He earned his PhD in computer science at the University of Texas at Arlington, his MS in computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, and his BS in mathematics and physics at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia.
“C++ for Lazy Programmers: Quick, Easy, and Fun C++ for Beginners” is available on Amazon.
