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C++ Programming Fundamentals (Cyberrookies Series) Review by anonymous
Don't be fooled by the other reviews, here's why...
First of all, I have the admit that this book is a easy and quick read. For the beginner, it doesn't overwhelm the reader with excess details and quickly jumps into many topics. Compared to many other C++ books, this one goes at a rapid pace and is easy to follow.
However, as a few others have mentioned, there are so many glaring mistakes that I cannot believe this even got published. The reason why (I believe) that this book either got 5 stars or 1 star is simply because the beginner C++ programmer does not know good programming practices and cannot pick up on the mistakes as well as an experienced programmer. If a beginner reader doesn't realize all the mistakes and bad form of the book, then it is definitely a top notch book.
Being a Java programmer and having a relatively strong understanding of C++, I figured this book would be a good quick refresher of C++ concepts. If you can understand the blatant mistakes and awful form that the author uses, then it isn't hard to overlook the first few mistakes. However, example after example, there are so many errors that even for someone who understands the mistakes shouldn't even bother with this book. The author even goes as far as to make poor programming practices after he just explained that you shouldn't make this mistake.
For example, the author writes,
"ANSI/ISO standards dictate that main must return an int. You will see some programmers return a void, but this is nonstandard. In this book, all main functions will return an int value. A return of 0 indicates that all is OK; a return of one indicates that something went wrong."
Then he follows up with the following example,
void main( void )
{
int i,j;
srand( (unsigned)time( NULL ) );
/* Display 10 numbers. */
for( i = 0;i < 10;i++ )
{
j= rand();
cout << j << endl;
}
}This is just one of the glaring mistakes in this book. Don't be fooled by the other reviewers. Yes, you may finish this book in a short amount of time, but the beginner programmer will spend MUCH more time later on trying to understand why something doesn't work (code examples have mistakes) and being lost in your own code because it is unreadable. This book may be suitable for someone who only wants to finish an assignment or quick basic program, but anything past that, you will be in a world of hurt because you will spend so much more time trying to understand why something doesn't work.
Most beginner programmers learn from source code. At the very least, it should work. Otherwise a book is nearly worthless.