Great for Newbie

Like many others have noted: this is great for people with hardly any structured education on programming. I work in business analysis on the sales side and always wanted to know more about what my IT staff had to do in order to deliver the solutions and applications I demanded from them. I went on YouTube and watched some free tutorials offered there that quickly and clearly show the basics (namely those by "TheNewBoston"). I then went to the library down the street to check out a book and learn the technical terms and such. I checked out this book and found it to be a great accompaniment with the tutorials I watched online (the tutorials online have a walk through on how to download and install a free compiler as well). I appreciate how thoroughly Smiley addresses all the topics given I have no comp sci or programming background, aside from some VBA macros and SQL Query. I am also going to buy the book just for the System Design Life Cycle introduction, given it serves as such a great outline as to how we should be going about systems upgrades at my company. Anyone looking to quickly become a paid developer will benefit from reviewing this section.

As for the complaints regarding Smiley being so thorough, using fictitious students, covering the SDLC, etc, I think those complaints are coming from people who simply didn't realize programming books are NOT necessarily novels. You don't have to read them cover to cover. You're allowed to skip around if something isn't of benefit, especially since many people come from different programming backgrounds. I will say though, once I'm done with this book, I'm not sure if I'll use it as much of a reference given it is pretty small/basic in scope. But again, that's not what it's really intended for. It's intended on literally serving as a tool for teaching people with no experience a sound fundamental approach for C++ and programming in general to a degree. Once I'm done with this book, I'll likely go on to buy another comprehensive/advanced book like Schildt's "Complete Reference", or the other book that has been mentioned in the comment section here for Smiley's book.

Also of note is Smiley's website which I tooled around on today and found other good resources on.

Other Reviews

• Great for Newbie
• Didn't read the book, but don't need to
• A mediocre book at best.
• A good base for C++, but not a lot of usefull content.