Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself Borland C++5 in 21 Days (Teach Yourself in 21 Days)

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Arnush's book "Teach Yourself Borland C++ in 21 Days"
provides many examples to get the novice programmer up and running with Borland's C++.

In comparasion to other authors like Barkakati, and Gurewich and Gurewich, who have also written books on the Borland C++
product, Arnush gives examples at the programming level to master more of the C++ language as opposed to the Borland Development Environment. I am waiting to see if Arnush will put out a new book developing in the Borland Environment.

I do like to see computer books with many examples, as was presented by Arnush, because it becomes clearer to see, when learning a language for the first time, how the pieces fit together. Also the 21 Day Series books give the reader goals to accomplish over that time period, which is an excellent teaching aid. I used Arnush's book for a graduate course and found it to be extremely helpful in getting through that course.

I am a self-taught programmer (of Pascal, C++, Perl, respectively), and I bought this book with the intention of being able to build some basic Window applications. (I figured that since one-third of a book covered windows programming, it would give me the basics.) I found it easy to mimic the programming, but I failed to really "learn" the OWL basics efficiently. (Maybe all I need is an OWL5 for Dummies book.)

While everything before the windows programming seemed alright, the Windows/OWL programming chapters (totalling 7 chapters or so) lacked in its organization. The book uses examples that are easy to conceptualize, but it often fails to explain the how and why of the code in a clear, concise, and timely manner. I found myself thinking, "What does this parameter do? Why do I use this to do that?" Eventually, everything gets explained, but only because I got into the habit of reading a chapter several times more than I usually do, reading ahead of the chapter before programming anything out of the chapter I'm studying, and consulting the OWL Help in the BC5 IDE. (Without the IDE online help, this book would not have a prayer.)

The book could use some illustrations explaining the relationship between various OWL classes, and which OWL classes handle what kinds of objects in windows. As I mentioned, everything is there, either in the help file or the text. My major complaint is that the organization within each chapter. My experience reading the book reminds me of running win95 on a 486sx25 with 4 megs of RAM. I eventually understood what I wanted to know, but the unanswered questions piled up and that kept me from learning efficiently. Although I eventually found answers, I don't feel that I have a solid understanding of OWL.

In addition to patience, and devotion to reading the text over and over, an espresso might help to keep you awake. There are certain parts that feel like reading a monotonous reference manual instead of a tutorial book. You might also consider hiring somebody to restrain you from deleting your compiler because of error messages. The book has printing errors, but you can download the source off the URL in the book.

Overall, the title is true in that it teaches C++. It explains the features of the compiler pretty well too. As for the OWL sections, the chapter order makes sense, but the organization within each chapter needs work. To say the most, I am qualified to plagiarize (cut and paste) windows code and have half a clue of what I'm doing. As for actually learning to program OWL, I think I'll ask IDG to make an OWL5 for Dummies after all.

Good for novice of C++ when he gets to business the Classes, constructors, and inherence. He is going directly into "deep constructors" not "shallow constructors" immediately if you know what I mean. Also using the debugger engine is not well explained which is the most important tool in C++.