Customer Reviews

Fast Track Visual C++(r) 6.0 Programming

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

 

 

This is the best book out there for beginners or even intermediates. The style is clear and easy to read, and the examples really help you to get up to speed fast. I still refer to it frequently. Definitely worth it!

I had a case of dejavu while reading this book... after a decent introduction the material falls off into a void of buggy code code examples and overly technical gobbledegook. It turns out that this one was written by the same guy who wrote XML Complete, another rushed-to-market computer book that was darned near close to worthless. If this was the only book available and the reader knew nothing about programming, then it might be appropriate to spend money on it. However, because C++ isn't an introductory language and there are dozens of better resources, it would be a poor choice. I know I have better things to do with my time than figure out why the author's code doesn't work.

It hasn't got many examples, the code is redundant but if you are a beginner, this is one of the best books you can start with.

I just finished Steven Holzner's "Advanced Visual C++ 5 and consider it to be one of the best books on the subject. I put it right up there with Petzold and Richter and highly suggest that if you want to learn VC++, get all 3 of these books. Petzold & Richter to understand what's going on and Holzner to get a lot of walk though workable samples to start programming quickly. I find the previous review to be hard to believe since Holzners book was the first book I bought out of about a dozen that I was able to build every sample without any modifications, unlike Petzold and Richter which required a little knowlege of the VC++ environment.

The walk-through examples are good for getting started with VC++ quickly but the book is very disorganized, some of the examples appear to have incorrect information, and half of the book is nothing but redundant code.

This is a decent book to get you up to speed with Visual C++.
There are many mistakes in the book that need corrected. If his is your first C++ book and you are new to programming it could become difficult to figure out what is wrong with the code. Mistakes like project name is MDIMenus and code example is CMenusMDIDoc which by the project name actually becomes CMDIMenusDoc. Could be a bit of a struggle for a beginner. But the struggle will help you in learning C++. I did enjoy doing the samples.

Initially looking at it it seemed like a good book. As I started using it, it has a lot of REDUNDANT code.
A lot of the code in the book is generated by VS. This takes up on average 2 pages. I wish he highlighted the code that he wants to illustrate. I had to spend time comparing my VS code with the one in the book to find out what changed. It seems like he wanted to have more pages in the book by doing this.

I recommend all of you programmers, hackers, teachers, students, to buy this book and read it as soon as possible. It is valuable, and informative.

-Chuong Nguyen-

Holzner does it again (or doesn't). Half the examples in the book don't work.. there isn't any more information here than appears in the first twelve pages of the manual.