C & C++ Cheat Sheets for Students (Printable PDF)

Six dense, colour-coded C and C++ cheat sheets: print them, pin them, pass the exam.

Stop hunting through 800-page textbooks the night before an exam. These cheat sheets put the things students actually look up (pointer rules, fopen modes, the rule of five, STL containers with Big-O, sorting complexity) on two landscape pages each, with real, working code examples.

WHAT'S INSIDE (6 sheets, 12 pages)

• (1) C Basics: types and sizes, operator precedence, control flow, functions, scope, printf / scanf format specifiers, structs, bit tricks, gcc flags

• (2) C Pointers & Memory: pointer arithmetic, arrays vs pointers, const pointers, malloc / calloc / realloc / free, memory-layout diagram, 9 classic memory bugs, valgrind and sanitizers

• (3) C Strings & File I/O: string.h with gotchas, safe copy patterns, fgets, strtol, fopen modes table, text and binary files, EOF pitfalls, argc/argv

• (4) C++ OOP: classes, constructors, rule of 3 / 5 / 0, construction order, inheritance and access table, virtual functions, slicing, operator overloading, templates, smart pointers, exceptions

• (5) C++ STL: all containers with a colour-coded Big-O table, iterator invalidation rules, vector / map / set / priority_queue examples, algorithms, lambdas, strings, optional / variant, C++20 ranges

• (6) Data Structures & Big-O: growth-rate table, data-structure and sorting complexity tables, graph algorithms, "when to use what", heap indexing, merge sort and quicksort, hash tables

WHY STUDENTS TRUST THEM

• Every code sample was compiled and run with GCC 16.2 (-Wall -Wextra -Wpedantic) and the output shown on the sheet matches

• Intentional bug examples are labelled and really do trigger the compiler warnings described

• Light theme designed for printing (works in black and white), colour-coded sections, monospace code boxes

YOU WILL RECEIVE (instant download, 1 zip)

• A4/: 6 PDFs for A4 paper

• US_Letter/: 6 PDFs for 8.5 x 11 in paper

• Screen_Dark/: 6 dark-mode PDFs for tablets and laptops (bonus)

• 3 all-in-one PDFs (A4, US Letter, dark) with bookmarks and a printing guide

• README.txt

HOW TO PRINT

Landscape, "Actual size" (100%), double-sided on the short edge. Each sheet is one piece of paper, front and back.

GOOD TO KNOW

• Digital product: no physical item is shipped

• For personal study use; please do not resell or redistribute

• C code follows C11; C++ code follows C++17 (C++20 parts are labelled)

• Colours may look slightly different on screen and on paper