What's "Intro to Programming in C++" at SL like??

[Merlin]

The best C++ compiler is CLION from Jetbrains. If you are already enrolled st TESU you get free academic pricing for a year...It is cross platform and works well.

FYI, CLION is not a C++ compiler, it is an IDE (Integrated Development Environment). That basically means it is an integrated source code editor, debugger, and project/source code management toolkit with a bunch of bells & whistles to make coding larger or more complex projects easier. It can leverage both the GCC and CLANG compiler toolchain, so you still need to install one of those.

Yes, having an IDE is nice, but isn't really necessary for this course since the projects are so simple. If someone wants to continue to develop more complex projects after they have completed the course, then installing an IDE that targets the type of projects you're interested in creating is definitely a good idea.

As for best IDE's to use, it depends on the target coding language, but on the Mac I've always preferred Eclipse or Xcode myself. From what I can see, CLion looks pretty good, and may even be superior, though it does cost $89/yr where Eclipse and Xcode are free. On a PC I have only used Eclipse and Visual Studio. Though I am a bit out of date since I haven't been a hands-on software developer for a number of years, and when I did, I was more C-language or server-side scripting (shell script, Perl, Python, SQL) focused.