Customer Reviews

C++ Standard Library From Scratch (From Scratch)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The author starts off by saying that this book is nothing like any other book on the market. Well that's true. It takes the reader from an application idea through to design and various concepts, until arriving at the finished product. Perhaps the title is a little underserving of the by products that the book offers, like object design and implementation to name a few. This approach is excellent for realising the full potential of the STL while developing an application.

The layout needs to be improved, there is just far too much writing! Although the material is covered in depth, the amount of reading required may entice some people to gloss over some of the paragraphs and miss vital pieces of information. Information that could be broken down into point form or highlighted, to make it easy to locate.

Another downer is that the author did not include an appendix of the STL (or the parts that he used) or list some of the algorithms available with the containers. This means the purchase of another book.

On a plus though, the author replied to my email on the same day which redeems one of his lost points.

I am half way through this book and thoroughly enjoying it. The STL is incredibly powerful. I have read Josuttis' book, which is also a great book, but once I finished it, I felt that I had a obtained a great appreciation for the STL, but was still a little uncomfortable using it. With this book I feel that I am getting a better feel for the library because I'm actually using it in the context of a real application and am able to experience first hand the usage and trade offs of the different containers/algorithms contained within the STL. Between the two books, I think that I will be well on my way to becoming STL proficient. Simply by working through this book, you will gain many months worth of valuable programming experience.

I am currently a student of C++ at Columbia University CTA track program. I was having difficulty following and understanding the concepts of container classes in the STL. How to use them, when they are more effective and appropriate were concepts I quickly and easily picked up by reading this book. It took my anxieties away and revived my interest in object oriented programming using C++. If you are an average Joe who happens to love programming with C++ this is the book to have. If you are a genious, I am sure there is something in it for you as well.

Good luck.

There are a lot of books out there in the market for C++ beginners as there are for advanced, the problem was there was not much for intermediate student and people who want to get into the ins and outs of this language. I have in my library about ten books on C++ . I know everything there is to know about Variables, Classes, Loops...etc. But not enough to make the transition from beginner to expert because of the reasons I mentioned above. This book should be advertised as " The missing link in C++ programming" You will find out that the teaching style used in this book (if you're past the beginners'stage) is excellent. You are learning it by doing it. It refreshes what you already know, and expands on that to introduce you to the right programming techniques from CONCEPTUALIZATION and ANALYSIS to DESIGN, IMPLEMENTATION, TESTING and ROLLOUT. I have almost gave up on my dream of becoming a talented programmer until now. Thank you Mr Liberty.

Great intermediate explanation of the C++ Standard Library complete with a project from beginning to end. I especially liked the approach the book took by equating its premise to learning a foreign language by interacting with native speakers rather then memorizing the vocabulary.

This is a very good approach to teaching the standard library. The author has a style very similar to mine, so perhaps I'm biased... but I don't think so. He writes clearly and with a purpose in mind: to help the reader understand the material as thoroughly as possible. And he accomplishes his goal, with only a few typos along the way as minor distractions.

One point I should clarify, though: as far as I can tell, Jesse Liberty's contribution to this book consists of having his name on the cover. While this is unfortunate for the actual author, whose real accomplishments are undermined by that association, it is much better for the reader than if Mr. Liberty had actually had anything to do with the writing of the book. In that case, I would have expected to see much less clarity in the explanations and hundreds of errors, as those are his trademarks.

Kudos to Mr. Halpern! Keep writing... but under your own recognizance. You shouldn't have any trouble finding a publisher who will take you on without any "sponsorship". Good, clear technical writing is hard to find.

After returning every STL book I've purchased I caught this book here on Amazon. Pablo Halpern does a great deed to the STL community by putting out a great book on STL topped off by the use of UML to help students understand the full cycle of developing an application. If you're new to the programming world this is a MUST have to quide you along analysis, design, and implementation with a concrete example. If you're a seasoned pro but are missing STL from your life ( much like I was til I read this book ) this book will get you going. Halpern does a great job of keeping the example on an open architecture, so for those of us who want more than in-memory persistence and a command line UI implement a database and our choice of UI for the example. I myself turned this into a great COM+ web application using ASP for presentation and an added layer of COM+ data objects from my collection to hit a SQL Server 2000 database...

I salute this author with his kind of patience to walk through the implementation of the tiny PIM with the STL and with very detail and clear explanation. He has started his plan well with the class diagrams. I have learnt and pickup a number of good programming techniques (as simple as the various way of string manipulation) from this book and going to try as many STL as possible in my project development using Borland Kylix 3 Professional (C++), GNU g++/gcc, Visual C++ Professional 6, Borland C++ 5.02 and Borland C++ Builder.