Customer Reviews

Practical C++ Programming (Nutshell Handbooks)

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

As a Java Programmer learning C++ I have found this book to be excellent. The author's concise explanations offer a great review for somewhat experienced programmers without sounding boring or redundant. For a beginning programmer it may seem too vague, but perhaps C++ isn't the best language to start with. The code examples are excellent and Oualline does a good job of explaining them. I also like his technique of intentionally putting errors in the examples and having the reader look for them. Also, the programming excersizes he has at the end of each chapter are similar to ones I did in my Intro to Programming class and probably fairly standard excersizes.

The book loses steam towards the end. The discussion of OO in C++ is pretty limited. It's still an excellent introductory book, however.

For my sins, I have to hack away in VB/VBA most of the day. My forays into C were limited to my undergrad days a full decade ago. For a long while, I had struggled with spare-time C++ learning from those 1000+ page monster "Teach yourself in 21 days, dummy..." tomes*, only to run out of patience a few chapters (= 100s pages) in. But living up to their reputation, O'Reilly have come thru with a not-for-dummies, concise, clear text. This book not only moved my C++ up the curve, it taught me a lot of things about where my VB was going wrong. The style chapters alone make for essential reading. I have recommended this to all my fellow corporate slave hackers, and although it may be a bit fast paced for an absolute beginner, I would think that most people would be able to follow and benefit from it given a bit of dedication. And lastly, it doesn't assume that you are enslaved to M$oft's VC++, unlike a good 75% of the market.

(*nowadays, if it doesn't say O'Reilly on the spine, I usually put it back on the shelf.)

This book is an excellent book for those wishing to learn C++. It is very well written, with good examples.

This is a great book for those wishing to learn C++ without any prior programming experience, and those with some experience in another language. I would even suggest this as a text for a first semester college level, "Introduction to C++," course. It even covers enough to be used for the first part of a second semester course, with coverage of overloading of operators for classes, templates, and modular programming (projects, and makefiles).

This book is short enough too that you can actually start learning quickly. Those "Learn C++ in 21 Days" books must expect people to be able to read those books all day long for 21 days, and maintain no employment, or else forget about any kind of social or family life afterwork.

It is not a book for those that already know C++, as it says on the back cover. So keep that in mind as you read the other reviews here that rate it low -- perhaps they should have read the back cover before buying it.

Where do I start? OK C book. Terrible C++ book.

The author's _Practical C Programming_ is OK. As some other reviewer said, it looks like he took the code examples from that book, changed "printf" to "cout", added a few pages on classes, and sent off the manuscript.

Many reviewers here have argued that this is supposed to be an introduction to C++, not an exhaustive tutorial, and so it's OK that the book doesn't cover many advanced topics. I strenuously disagree. As Allen Holub has pointed out, C++ is so full of traps and pitfalls that there's no point in using it unless you are going to make full use of its advanced features. The advanced features *are* the core of the language. So any introduction to C++ must get into inheritance, virtual functions, templates, operator overloading, and the STL as soon as possible.

But not only does this book not deal with the features of the language that it should, but the material it *does* deal with is presented in an inexcusably poor way. It's clear that Oualline really doesn't know C++, or he would use inheritance correctly---hell, he would declare main() correctly!

Summary: If you try to pick up C++ from this book, you'll do your understanding of the language permanent damage. Far and away the best beginner's book on C++ is Stephen Prata's _C++ Primer Plus_. (Not the similarly titled Stanley Lippman book, which I think is vastly overrated.) O'Reilly should be ashamed to have published _Practical C++ Programming_---it is *not* up to their standard.

This book made me tingle all over. This is not a product for beginner programmers but a good solid introduction to C++ for someone (like me) who is switching languages. I started out as a pure ASP programmer and I found this book entirely comprehensible and extremely informative.

This book was great. The author does a great job of explaining the relevance of each of the topics. I also think it is good that he talked a lot about style. One of the difficult steps to a beginning programmer is making the jump from short learning exercises where you can get away with sloppy code, to programs that actually do something useful.

Anyone who says this book focuses too much on style has never worked on an actual application, has never debugged parts of an actual program, or tried to modify somebody else's code. When it comes to programming languages, there's a difference between knowing how it works, and how to use it. Learning good style is the best way a book can demonstrate how to use the language.

Not that this book is just about style, it's just that you could write a book purely about the language itself, and it would be less than 100 pages - the syntax is not the important part. If I need help with syntax, I'll highlight a statement and press F1! :)

Also, a book about C++ should NOT be thousands of pages! This book is concise, but not skimpy. It does not include detailed information on some advanced features, however when you're ready for those features you should just read Stroustrup!

BTW, I was already familiar with C when I read this book, and with the object oriented concept (through Java), so I can't judge whether it is appropriate for extreme beginners. I felt it was perfect for the amount of knowledge I had, I just skipped over the introductory stuff.

Steve Oualline has another book, Practical C Programming. I have not read that book, but judging the quality of the code examples in this book, I imagine that he ripped out about 75% of the code examples from that book. So many of his code snippets start with "void main()" that it drove me crazy! He gets it right, sometimes, with "int main (void)", but he is very inconsistent. The most egregious error, in my opinion, was an example he used to try to explain classes. He tries to use a "class (name)" example as a base class for tax forms!!! What is that? That is clearly not an "is-a" relationship, a term he conspicuously leaves out. The code throughout is not ANSI standard C++, and really needs to be cleaned up. Granted, the book was written before the ANSI standard was formally adopted, but this book should have long since been rewritten with the new standard in mind. Steer clear of this book!

A great guide for beggining to intermediate level C++ programmers. Does an amazing job of laying out guidelines for creating well written, readable code. Includes questions and answers to common coding mistakes in each chapter as well as programming exercises that force you to use what you just learned "hands-on". Is the only programming book that hasn't bored me to hell ( much like a good novel I couldn't put it down ). Being very readable, the book makes you WANT to finish each chapter so you can go to work on the next set of exercises and see if you can crank out the next program without errors. Blah, blah, anyhow...If you are just getting started with C++, GET this book ( just know that you'll need another to teach you OOP as stated in some other reviews ).

don't even bother. I first learned C++ with this book and then switched to some others, GNU C++ for Linux and C++ How to Program. When I recently went back to this book I discovered what a foul job was done, especially with classes. Declare the data member of a linked list node class as public? Give me a break. He says once that he prefers structured programming over OO. Well that is good, because he sure( ) at coding objects.

I am a Fortran programmer for over 6 years. I found this book gave me tips to quickly get started and running C++ programmes. However, this book does not take the initiative in explaining concepts very well. Reading this book is not enough to get a good understanding of C++. I recommend that the reader of this book must read other books on this subject as well.