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You Can Do It!: A Beginners Introduction to Computer Programming Review by Jaime Moreno
Another beginner's book in the "Who's afraid of C++" vein
This is another book in the spirit of "Who is afraid of C++" that came out a while back and also tried to teach a complete novice C++ via a correspondence between the book author and someone completely new to programming.
From what I"ve read it's alot more accurate than the former since this book author is on the C++ standards committee so I noted few errors.
I really enjoyed the questions the novice asked at the end of the chapters since they were the same questions that I asked myself when first learning C++ and some of them are quite funny now that I have more C++ knowledge.
If you are a total novice though this book can get rough at times since the author covers quite a bit of material in each chapter. It' probably take two readings from someone totally new to programming to get the most of it.
Especially, around chapter 4 the book gets exponentially difficult and I suppose most reader's unless they had prior C++ experience or a mentor would give up at this point. The author didn't help things any by refusing to provide the sourcecode for the chapter programs on the cd since he feels you should type them all up yourself to learn.
So, the other thing I really found issue with and the reason I'm knocking off 1 star is for the inclusion of a library that is closely tied to the IDE that is used throughout the book to provide graphics support and to make the programs more interesting. First off all the directions on setting it up are quite poor and if you want to use another IDE to run the programs you need to mess with the library sourcecode as I did to get it to work which would be quite a difficult task for a beginner!
So Mac and Linux user's are left out in the cold since the author only provides support for Windows users so that may be a dealbreaker for some.
But if you want to learn C++ the way it's supposed to be used and correctly this book will get you started.
Finally, if you are able to tough it out to the end of the book you will have built quite a few cool graphic programs including a LOGO turtle emulator.
Since the author did not provide a version of playpen for macosx or visual studio(probably most popular ide for windows) I went ahead and did it. I have the instructions posted here for anyone else interested in using this book here:
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