Customer Reviews

C++ Cookbook (Cookbooks (O'Reilly))

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

 

 

Unlike a self-proclaimed "C++ Wizard," I'm of the opinion that this book is inherently useful in many ways, even for experienced programmers. Basically, it offers several ways to tackle various programming challenges with C++-centric solutions.

Whining about brace style is a hopelessly lost cause. K&R style braces save lines and reduces page count in the publishing industry. Get used to it or get out of it, I say.

However, this isn't a rant.

There is a good portion of the book that would be more helpful to aspiring programmers and less useful to advanced programmers, such as "Making Sure a Header File Gets Include Only Once." In my programming career, I've seen a lot of bad code. If more developing programmers would have read this book, my life would surely have been easier!

Like any cookbook, a recipe is a guideline for producing a desired result. It is up to the chef to decide when to depart from the guideline and by how much. It is oftentimes difficult to find the core solution in a set of API documentation, for example, in string handling. The C++ Cookbook has a whole chapter on string manipulation and text processing. It is much easier to look at the often short and sweet recipes in the book and decide whether or not they are close enough to what you want to do to use them as a baseline for writing your own code, rather than just referring to an API document and trying to figure out which set of operations you want to use to accomplish the task at hand.

I don't think that this book is some kind of answer to all of our C++-related prayers; what cookbook have you used that can be so much to so many? In all, it is a worthwhile product for those seeking assistance with their everyday coding. It does tend to promote Boost. Boost is a large project of common C++ "needs" wrapped up in a fairly platform agnostic package and available as a free download. It is a lot like a "Swiss Army Knife" API for C++ in a way similar to what the JDK is to Java developers.

C++ Cookbook will be very helpful to programmers who don't want to spend time solving every little problem themselves. It may not be the best text for a veteran with ingrained Computer Sciences education, but for self-taught, non-CS disciplinarians, it may well be the ticket to writing much better code in less time. For someone making a transition from C to C++, it is an indepensible "how to" reference that you can easily read when the mood strikes. If you think FILE* before fstream, chances are this book will be a big help!

A few aspects of the book are specific to a particular platform, though for the most part, it is platform independent.

Not every C++ book needs to be written for the hardcore daily-life programmer. Hobbyists and others who find that they need to use C++ are certain to find it full of useful nuggets. There are often dozens of ways to set about solving a particular programming challenge. This book offers its solutions in a very readable, enjoyable manner that is also interesting and practical. If you're a C++ Wizard, you probably don't need this book, but in my experience, more than half the guys who think they're C++ Wizards tend to be wanna bes.

There is a lot of good information inside of this book that should be known by most experienced C++ programmers. There are also a lot of good information that is easily forgotten by programmers who don't work in a particular area of the language very often. The Cookbook provides an easy way to look up the recipe and implement a viable solution without having to sort through barely comprehensible API documentation, which is often a lot like trying to bake a chocolate cake with the first steps being milk the cow and fetch the eggs, or more likely sometimes, plant the grass so that you can raise cows to eventually milk! This book is more like a box of cake mix. Maybe not perfect in the eyes of a master chef, but good enough for the rest of us to use and enjoy.

The 'C++ Cookbook' is a great resource for any developer that might be new to or still mastering the C++ programming language. Packed with over 500 pages and broken up into 15 chapters, this book is well written and easy to follow. My main "gripe" with this book is that when I think of a cookbook, many times it's full of solutions are less well known, or slightly more challenging tasks that the average programmer might not know the solution to. With this cookbook, I feel it's geared more towards the more junior level developer who isn't a master of the language and is still learning their trade. I don't feel that this book is perfect for senior programmers, but it DOES offer common solutions in one book, so I might be incorrect in this assumption. All in all, a solid book, and one well worth keeping on your desk and you code with C++!!

**** RECOMMENDED

Im a freshman in college and just finished my second c++ programming course, this book was my best friend. It gives you plenty of ways to do a given task and covers a broad range of topics. Because it covers a broad range of topics, even if a specific "recipe" doesn't do exactly what you want, there is usually no trouble in changing/tweaking it ever so slightly to do what you want to do for a specific problem. It's very well written and easy to understand for the laymen to c++ (like me!!)

This cookbook is a little shorter than those with the other languages, but while that may seem odd, it might not after you find that it doesn't cover operating system specific patterns. The recipes center around the basics, file I/O, strings, containers. Only at the end does it get into higher level topics like multithreading and XML.

These may sound like gripes. They aren't. This is a good book. The writing is good. The code is solid. You will find these recipes handy.

That being said, I would have liked more material on regular expressions and memory management with Boost.

This book contains a lot of clever code fragments. Unfortunately I've found numerous bugs in them and some code fails to compile all together. Take for example the author's matrix class, it uses nested templates (partial specialization) which does not work on most compilers, including the latest VC++. At the very least then, the cookbook should have provided alternate means of achieving the task given that Visual C++ is listed as a supported compiler. In other areas I have found bugs and poor initializations. Granted, the programs show the way that tasks could be done. But this is not an algorithms book (and spends very little time discussing the algorithms). It is clear that the authors did not even bother compiling the code snippets on every "supported" compiler, so how can I believe they have tested them? If I want to debug code, I'd rather spend the time debugging my own than someone else's.

The bottom line is that a code from a "cookbook" is supposed to work out of the box and have good instructions on how to extend and modify the code. This books' do not. As such this book is of little value.

Are you a C++ programmer? If you are, then this book is for you. Authors D. Ryan Stephens, Christopher Diggins, Jonathan Turkanis and Jeff Cogswell, have done an outstanding job of writing a book about solving common problems with C++, but not a book about learning C++.

Stephens, Diggins, Turkanis and Cogswell, begin by showing you recipes that contain recipes for transforming C++ source code into executable programs and libraries. Then, the authors show you recipes that describe techniques that you apply from within header files. Next, they show you solutions to common problems when working with C++'s numeric types. The authors also show you recipes for working with strings and text files. They continue with an overview of how to manipulate dates and times. Then, the authors describe the data structures in the standard library that you can use to store data. Next, they describe how to work with the standard algorithms and how to use them on the standard containers. The authors also show you solutions to common problems related to working with C++ classes. They continue by showing you recipes for using C++'s exception-handling features. Then, the authors present an overview of streams and files. Next, they provide you with solutions to common numerical programming problems and demonstrate how to use generic programming techniques to write numerical code effectively. The authors also describe how to write multithreaded programs in C++ using the Boost Threads library. They continue by describing solutions to some common requirements when internationalizing C++ programs. Then, the authors present an overview of XML. Finally, they describe a few facets of C++ that do not actually fit neatly into any of the other chapters: Function and member pointers, const variables and member functions, and standalone operators and a few other topics.

Throughout this most excellent book, the authors give real life solutions that reflect the current best practices in C++ programming. More importantly, they focus on performance and portability, with a strong emphasis on formal and ad hoc standards.

I bought this book because I wanted the equivalent of the "Python Cookbook" but for C++. However, I didn't find that level of information on the C++ version of the cookbook. Quite disappointing.

However, I have found out that a similar level of expertise can be found in the typical "Exceptional" and "Essential" book series. But also in the wonderful CodeProject web page http://www.codeproject.com/.

A good book in a nice and handable format to take a look at the most importance topics in the c++ programming