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Sams Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours, Complete Starter Kit (3rd Edition) (Sams Teach Yourself in 24 Hours) Review by William D. Stepp
Good for Programmers, Bad for Newbies
The only language I've programmed in the past is C# and I still consider myself a beginner in that language.
Recently I got a job where I had to learn C++ very quickly. Now I have to say this book provided a great C++ cram session to get me up to speed. I had read Liberty's Learning C# 2005: Get Started with C# 2.0 and .NET Programming (2nd Edition) and liked his style, and was not disappointed with this book content-wise (except some of his examples seem a little too involved for the concepts they're meant to illustrate but not too bad).
The glaring thing I noticed, and the reason for the 3-star review, is that this book does not cater to the beginner to programming whatsoever - even though the book promotes itself that way. I can say without hesitation if you are just learning your first language then you will be utterly lost reading this book. I'm not so far from being a newbie myself to see the author takes for granted the reader's familiarity with basic programming concepts.
However, like I wrote above, if you are transitioning from another OOP language like C# or Java, then you will find this book to be a great primer to get you up to speed. I found the "By the Way" info capsules to provide useful insights into the language.