Lab 00 — Your First Build Lab

Week 0 · ~45–60 min · starter + Debug It + self-check · ← Orientation hub · lab brief below

The course’s labs follow one shape from now on: build a program → hunt bugs in a seeded file → write up → self-check against the rubric. Lab 00 is that shape, at Week-0 size. Everything is saved in cpp-course/unit-00/ (see lab work layout).

Files

Part 1 — Build the poster

Scenario. Terminals have no graphics — but they have characters. Your program prints a name poster: a framed card with your name, your city, and a goal for this course.

Requirements

1. Six output lines exactly, in this shape:

   =========================
   |                       |
   |   AYESHA KHAN         |
   |   Lahore · BS Data Sci|
   |                       |
   =========================
   

   (yours will differ — the *shape is the spec: top border, blank wall, name line, city + goal line, blank wall, bottom border)*

2. Your name on one line; your city + your course goal on the next.
3. Both borders are the same width, and the widest content line fits inside them (count the characters — this is the exercise’s quiet lesson).
4. Compiles with zero warnings: g++ -std=c++17 -Wall -Wextra lab-00-poster.cpp -o lab00
5. At least one chained << statement.

Method (this is the real curriculum): add one output line, compile, run, look. Repeat. Small steps, always compiling — the habit all 16 units run on.

Part 2 — Debug It

Open starter/lab-00-debug-it.cpp. It should print a poster — but contains 4 seeded bugs: two compile errors, a linker-flavoured mistake, and a wrong-output bug the compiler cannot catch.

Rules of the hunt

• Read the code and write down all four before fixing anything.
• Fix one bug, recompile, and note what the compiler said (or didn’t).
• Stuck? Hint ladder: re-read reading error messages → troubleshooting scenarios → error catalogue → then compare with your Part 1 solution’s techniques.

Done means: it compiles warning-free, prints a correct poster, and you can say for each bug what kind it was (compile / link / logic) and how you found it.

Part 3 — Write it up

Create lab-00-notes.md (half a page, the course’s standard lab write-up):

# Lab 00 — notes
## What it does        two sentences, plain words
## Sample run          paste one real run from your terminal
## How I built it      3–5 bullets: order of steps, one design choice + why
## Debug It            the 5 bugs: kind (compile/link/logic), how found, fix

Self-check (score yourself, /5)

5/5 → Week 0 is complete: tick the setup checklist and begin Unit 01 · Lesson 1 — where the same cout lines become a subject of study instead of a tool.

← Orientation hub · Exercises · Getting Started lesson