Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

For some reasons, I had expected a book on reflections on Stroustrup's philosophy of C++ programming aimed at experienced practitioners. I was quite surprised by the heft of the book, but much more so by the content. It's a book for non-programmers or beginners to teach them how to program with C++ as the vehicle and it's structured for use as a textbook for a first year college course. Physically, the book is massive, weighing in at over 1200 pages. It is printed on good quality semi-glossy paper and the extensive use of color will remind some of the Deitel & Deitel series, at least superficially. The prospective student will probably benefit from a comparison of this book to the existing leading tutorial books. The leaders, by popularity or quality, are (in no specific order): Lippman, Lajoie, & Moo's C++ Primer (4th Edition), Eckel's Thinking in C++: Introduction to Standard C++, Volume One (2nd Edition) (Vol 1) and Thinking in C++, Volume 2: Practical Programming, Dietel & Deitel's C++ How to Program (6th Edition), Koenig & Moo's Accelerated C++: Practical Programming by Example (C++ In-Depth Series), Lippman's Essential C++ (C++ In-Depth Series), and Prata's C++ Primer Plus (5th Edition). These all share the common purpose of teaching the C++ language, so an effort is made to cover the features and concepts, with examples that were constructed to illustrate them. This is NOT Stroustrup's approach. Stroustrup isn't trying to teach the C++ language. He's teaching how to program. C++ is the tool he uses to do so. This isn't a subtle difference. It's the difference between teaching you about a wrench and making up fake car parts to fix with the wrench and teaching you auto repair and giving you a wrench to do so. You still learn the tool as you go along, but it's a side effect. The overall direction of the book is to teach students how to program solutions to real problems in a way that one would in the real world. Things that other books consider "extraneous to illustrating the principle" aren't swept under the carpet. Inputs are validated. Code is tested. Errors are detected. Exceptions are thrown and caught. They're not incidental details, they're part of the solution, and that's how Stroustrup presents them. Yet, these "details" don't detract from the readability or understandability of the code. In fact, they preempt the stream of "but what about..." questions that students will inevitable have when presented incomplete toy code. Chapters 6 and 7 are gems. They develop an expression evaluator, walking the student through a tokenizer, parser, and interpreter without bogging the student down with deep theory that will be learned in later courses and is unnecessary to get started (though many will be inspired to go read up on it). Besides showing some interesting and useful techniques, understanding an expression evaluator goes a long way toward understanding programming languages in general. The discussion on containers and iterators explains how one would go about designing them, not just using them. Once the development of a vector-like container is described, the other standard containers are presented for the student to use. No time is wasted trying to teach data structures, for which other classes and books already exist. The same applies to sorts and other basic algorithms. The standard ones are presented for immediate use by the student. There are chapters on basic I/O, GUI and graphics (using FLTK), data formatting, and numerical programming (this is my least favorite). There is also some cursory coverage of upcoming C++ features as they are found in boost, such as regular expressions. Because this book deliberately targets beginners, you won't find advanced topics like template metaprogramming. There are entire books (three of them!) dedicated to that. Finally, there is some brief discussion of the history of C++, on its own and in the context of the evolution of programming languages in general. I would have enjoyed more of this. If I were to teach a course, this book would be my first choice. A disciplined self-learner would also be well served by this book. However, it does not try to target those who already know how to program and wish to migrate to C++, though they would doubtless find this book interesting and well written. For them, I would recommend "Accelerated C++" or "Essential C++" to bring them up to speed quickly or ""C++ Primer" to study the language more in depth. For those coming from a language that is conceptually different from C++, the two "Thinking in C++" volumes do a good job of aiding in the paradigm shift. I am deliberately omitting non-tutorial books like the "Effective C++" and "Exceptional C++" series, though they are certainly essential. Everyone -- beginner and migrating expert -- should avoid C++ How to Program (6th Edition). Notwithstanding the pretty presentation, this book teaches abysmal programming practices, such as blatant and amateurish violations of the Liskov Substitutability Principle. Naturally, every C++ programmer should own The C++ Programming Language: Special Edition (3rd Edition) and C++ in a Nutshell is a marvelous one-stop reference. As a side note, there is a long running debate over which language is most suitable for teaching an introduction to programming. C++ is usually one of the first to be eliminated. This book puts C++ back in the running and and shows that it's more about the teacher than it is about the language.