Go and do a trivial project in it, cppreference.com and cplusplus.com have c++11 tags on the new features. I'm sure you've had ideas recently and I'm sure the project is less trivial than you thought!
I think looking at language features first is "a solution looking for a problem" attitude.
I'm sure there are some people that think this will be OK; after all, lots of people say you don't really have to understand templates unless you're writing a library (and so on). But I don't think it will be OK. There was very little in C++98 (that I knew well, at the time) that it was OK not to know; unless you knew all of it, pretty much, you couldn't really use any of it safely. (This is how Scott Meyers makes his living.) I can't imagine C++11 will be any different; I might not know it well, but I do note that it has many of the same people behind it.
Thank you for perhaps the best summation of everything wrong with using C++ in a project, and everything wrong with C++ as a language!
C.
:)
Well played, at any rate.
templates, as you say yourself you're ok not to know. you're also not ok not to know exceptions.
there's other stuff too, you can get away without the C preprocessor. C++ is too big to know all of and it's a waste of time to invest time trying to, unless you are on a standards committee or are writing a compiler...(and even then you can get away with being a specialist!).
it's much better to be a program writer than a language lawyer and dare I say it: more satisfying too.
i draw a huge distinction between people that understand a language and people that can use a language, and i think people underestimate the time and effort in understanding a language. i think that time and effort could be better spent writing programs.
Or you work on an existing codebase. Most C++ code that I worked on had templates, exceptions, and used the C preprocessor.
I used to have your attitude. This works for many languages, e.g. if you know some of the syntax of Python or Go and the usual stuff from the standard library, you can get pretty far.
If you want to write modern C++, this is not really true. You need to know about const correctness, lifetimes, some templates, etc. Or you cannot deal with most projects or libraries, like Boost, Eigen, etc.
It's like saying you can program Haskell in 2014 without knowing typeclasses, lenses, GADTs, etc. You can write some educational form of Haskell, sure. But many libraries use these.
I know nothing of haskell. My point is that you should learn the features of the codebase you work on, and it's a waste of time to learn all features, ultimately for a codebase you are not working on or may never work on.
incidentally, ditto, i used to have your attitude.
Sure, but there are a ridiculous number of edge cases which result in undefined behavior -- this is something that cannot be avoided when learning C++. You really need to understand what undefined behavior means and what precautions you need to take to avoid it. (Don't get me wrong, recent standards let you write code that's a lot less likely to run into UB, but you need to learn that from somewhere. You should definitely not be approaching modern C++ as an improved C!)
i didn't say to approach C++ as an improved C. you are more likely to learn undefined behaviour from compiler warnings than reading a merry array of 500 page books before sitting down to not finish a program.
I think starting from somewhere with modern C++ means not starting at C strings, arrays, and bare pointers but starting with STL containers, STL algorithms, and smart pointers etc. to build good habits. But eventually any good introduction has to cover C arrays etc. as well.
Back when I started C++, Accelerated C++ was that sort of introduction. But AFAIK it's not updated for C++ 11 or 14.
Places I have worked the code is divided into libraries and coding standards per library are different to the whole. The point is to lazily learn the part that the codebase you are working on uses and get cracking rather than waste time getting book smart on parts you may never use.
I'd take a book like Scott Meyer's new Effective Modern C++ book (which I recommend) and focus on applying one item every week. At the start of the week read through the item. Every time you write code for that week make an effort to see if that item applies to what you're doing. Maybe read the item again midweek or towards the end of the week to see if the practical experience changes your view on what he wrote. The book contains 42 items so if you go through it like this you'd be done in less than a year.
I'm not saying that people shouldn't read the whole book at once. However, if you just read it through once and put it on the shelf I don't think you'll get the same benefit that you would get from spending time focusing on individual areas.
I think of any language as another tool in my toolbox. The better I know a tool, the better I know when and how to apply it to a specific problem.
I'd wager that just one trivial project won't fully demonstrate the personality and capabilities of a language.