Customer Reviews

C++ from the Beginning (2nd Edition)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book does deserve its name for sure, since it can be read by any beginner, but also goes well further than a lot of other books on the subject. Most of the common advanced topics - (true) polymorphism, templates, and even some often-used structures - are covered in details enough to allow the reader to understand and efficiently use them. All along the text, the examples are longer enough to be useful, and shorter enough to stay what they are meant to be: examples... Though I would not consider this book as The reference, I would recommend it to any person wishing to gain serious confidence in object-oriented programmation in C++.

I had some prior knowledge about programming concepts before reading this book and I was glad of that. Although the book covers very basic issues as well as fairly complicated issues like data encaptulation, inheritance and polymorphism I found the book to lack a lot of examples. It's my experience that only I can teach my self a given programming language through writing examples and "play" with these. The examples in the book however, are small and always assumes you've just made the prior part of an example a few pages back and that just doesn't work for me! It's not a bad book but you'll need to supplement with another book to show you more examples.

The type of the teaching for this book is all build-up upon the examples and it doesn't refer to the C knowledge of the reader,so even if you don't know anything about C,this book can take you to the medium level.Good starting book.

Well, I wanted to comment on this book from the perspective of someone who is a beginner to programming. I do have a little experience in HTML, Latex, and Mathematica. A friend gave me the book, saying it was the perfect book for a beginner, not requiring any prior programming knowledge. In fact, the author makes the claim "There is no onus on the reader to know C, or any other programming language for that matter." Well, here I am. I got through about the first pages of chapter 3, then I gave up (I gave it three shots). The problem is that, e.g. on the first few pages, sentences like the following are basically right next to each other:
"The diagram shows the most common input and output units for communication with people: a screen (monitor), a mouse, and a keyboard."
"All declarations in the standard libraries are done in a namespace called std."
That second sentence was not explained (instead, the author said that it would be OK not to understand this). And that would be my main point of critique: Why would you write that without explaining it? Unfortunately, after a while (for me after ca. 80 pages), these not explained things piled up and made it harder and harder to keep everything together in terms of understanding. Learning started to be no fun at all anymore because I was loosing overview.

The book is probably a good book. It seems pretty well written etc. But if you have about as much experience as I have, chances are you will get lost somewhere within the first 100 pages.

I purchased this book for a college class in Computer Science. Being already familiar with C, I was expecting that the book would get immediately into the guts of C++, i.e. Object Oriented Programming.

Sad to say, this book spends most of the first 5 chapters attacking C++ from a C perspective. The only new C++ constucts presented early were "cin >>" and "cout <<". The first real discussion of classes isn't until page 63, where the vector, list, and deque classes are discussed as alternatives to arrays.

If you're a C programmer, you'll have no problem following the book, but then you might as well start reading at Chapter 6 (pg. 203!) although you might find yourself wondering why you had to buy the first third of the book (it's ~600 pages total) in the first place.

If you're a fresh, un-"C-tainted" programmer, learn programming from an Object Orientation first. That way you won't learn bad habits that you'll be forced to un-learn later.

jmtc

fantastic C++ book for beginners, you will understand all the concepts by the time you are done with this book.

I have bought many books on C++ for college courses, but this one is much easier to learn from. It gives good examples, and builds on these pieces of information to give the user a good understanding. The only suggestion would be to have a book of the exercise answers available to purchase. The course instructor is using this book for background info, and not making assignments from it, so the answers to the exercises would be helpful to my learning effort.

Skansholm's book is concise and pragmatic. I have read both of his work on C++ and Java and it trully a must for beginners. The book is very good explaned and all programs can be run from PCs and UNIX machines. There are tons of similiar books on the market but Skansholm's work excel in both interesting examples and academically sound.