Comprehensive and Incomplete

This book is very comprehensive and it has helped me in select topic areas, but I find it to be incomplete or inadequately explained in some topic areas.

This book takes a syntactically functional overview of C++ and not an object-oriented overview. Thus, it is very hard to find topics on major concepts within the book as they are presented in pieces throughout the book. I had a difficult time finding for example topics relating to "const". Some material was sparsely covered in the "C Subset of C++" part, but one couldn't see how this relates to classes, e.g. const member functions and data. I did eventually find the const member function, which by the way was not indexed, in the chapter "Namespaces, Conversion Functions, and Other Advanced Topics" (page 609). I could never find information about using const variables in classes and how to properly initialize them, which is done through a member initialization list. I had to get this information from another book.

This book is a decent reference, but it is hard to find out to accomplish major OOD concepts. For those never exposed to programming, this might be a good reference book. But for those that know OOD concepts, and need to know how to implement a particular concept, they'll need to sleuth through the book to piece together tokens of information, and even still might not see the whole picture.

Other Reviews

• Simple review
• Neither complete nor a great reference
• One of the most comprehensive C++ books available
• Comprehensive and Incomplete
• Great book ! Has everything you want to know and more