GCC: Use OpenSSL's SHA256 Functions-Collection of common programming errors

I’m writing a program to get myself acquainted with OpenSSL, libncurses, and UDP networking. I decided to work with OpenSSL’s SHA256 to become familiar with industry encryption standards, but I’m having issues with getting it working. I’ve isolated the error to the linking of OpenSSL with the compiled program. I’m working on Ubuntu 12.10, 64 bit. I have the package libssl-dev installed.

Take, for instance, the C++ main.cpp:

#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 
using namespace std;

#include 

string sha256(const string str)
{
    unsigned char hash[SHA256_DIGEST_LENGTH];
    SHA256_CTX sha256;
    SHA256_Init(&sha256);
    SHA256_Update(&sha256, str.c_str(), str.size());
    SHA256_Final(hash, &sha256);
    stringstream ss;
    for(int i = 0; i < SHA256_DIGEST_LENGTH; i++)
    {
        ss