Clearly written, CD not useful

I bought this in order to freshen up my programming experience so I could work more effectively with mentoring youth in our high school robotics program. I found the book very useful in building on my ancient Fortran programming experience; I now have a much better understanding of how to read C++ syntax and how to use it. In addition, I also have an understanding of why some practices are preferred. I am likely to buy a few more of these to use with the youth.

The book is delivered as a set of one-hour activities that (for the most part) build on one another. For planning purposes, I found many of them fit reasonably well in the one-hour time slot, although I spent several hours each on a few units. I manually entered most of the source code to help me internalize the concepts, so they could definitely have been done more quickly using the pre-existing source code.

I would give this product five stars on the basis of the book alone. However, I was unable to find a license on the web to allow use of the compiler on the attached CD (it may be out there, but I couldn't find it). Initially I was concerned about possible compatibility issues, so I wasted some time installing the compiler, looking fruitlessly for the license, then uninstalling it.

I was ultimately successful in setting up NetBeans IDE with MinGW, and found no incongruities in the code operation relative to the text. Note that I observed an error in the text on page 46: the signs are wrong in last sentence in the Analysis section. Otherwise I didn't see any problems.

In summary, this provides a clearly-written set of exercises for beginning programmers to get somewhat comfortable with C++.

Other Reviews

• Clearly written, CD not useful
• DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK - All links and programs outdated
• Software key was unavailable
• Lack of examples dooms it.
• Good for Programmers, Bad for Newbies