Really, really good

Programmers-in-training have this nasty, nasty tendency to purchase a slew of books only to leave half (or more!) of them virtually (if not literally!) untouched.

I am such a culprit -- I bought quite a few C++ books, including this one, when I started out, but left it collecting dust on my bookshelf. However, when I'd been away from programming for a while and wanted to relearn C++, I decided to give this book a read. I'm glad that I did.

The book is geared toward those with some conception of programming and how programming languages are used (I still remembered a bit o' C++, but nothing quite fancy), so I didn't find myself bored out of my mind when reading the initial 10 or so chapters on the C subset of C++ (which, I may add, are extremely well written and have practical examples -- like a bubblesort!) Then when I got to the chapters on OOP (of which I recalled almost nothing), I found myself in for a real treat. Everything was lucidly explained coupled with an ample number of full example programs to aid in understanding.

I particularly liked the sample programs because they tended to be serious and were overall very, very useful and facilitated learning rather than obstruct it.

If you're just coming off of a language like BASIC, Java, or C#, then I reccomend this book wholeheartedly -- you'll be programming C++ like there's no tomorrow within a reasonably short time. If you're a programming neophyte, you can probably go through the book and be fine -- but be prepared to work, experiment, and practice (although you'd do that anyway -- just moreso if you're a newbie).

So, yeah, excellent book; definitely worth buying.

Other Reviews

• Some good points and some not so good
• Really, really good
• I don't recommend this book for beginners learning C++
• good examples
• Great text for beginning C++ programmers