Jesse Liberty, Bradley L. Jones
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 14
Average rating: 4.0 of 5
Recommended with caveats 3 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.
I have programmed for years but never in a modern object-oriented language and I wish to maintain a C++ project. So I purchased this book. I also searched online for "C++ tutorials". In general, I think this book is OK.
Compared to online resources, this book provides a fuller and often deeper explanation of the basics of C++. Sometimes it was too much depth (e.g., showing a picture of a fence to explain the fence-post error was not particularly needed), but you can always skip the rest of the page. I think I gained a better understanding of the use inheritance, virtual methods, and polymorphism through Liberty's examples.
I can definitively deny other reviews of this book that suggest that Liberty uses older POD arrays of pchar/char... he uses strings except late in the course where he shows an implementation of a string class. One of the things I learned from the additional material in Liberty's book is why this is controversial and why "#include " and "#include " are different. (Liberty's is a modern, "#include " book.)
The book is also full of code examples which are explained concisely (which is nice, after the first introduction of "#include " you don't need the author to explain it each time). There is a degree of review and each chapter ends with "Q&A" (kind of a short FAQ for that chapter), a quiz and some exercises. The exercises are generally split between "do this" and "debug this" items. There are answers at the back of the book.
Finally, I think OOP requires new analysis and object design skills and on-line tutorials are mostly silent about this critical issue. Liberty provides one full chapter that is quite good at providing an overview (IMHO).
My main criticism is a matter of expectations; this book teaches you A LITTLE C++. The back of the book says "you'll have all the skills you need to BEGIN programming C++" (my emphasis). You still have a considerable learning curve as you master even intermediate aspects. A good example is implementing "one class per file". In passing on day 6 Liberty explains that he is NOT showing you the way professional C++ programmers write code and he provides a single and very incomplete example of splitting your work into multiple files. Working from this, I find that I do not understand namespaces well enough from the discussion on day 18 to work with multiple files.
Also, I noticed a few errors in the book. Unless I very misunderstand, inline class methods were mislabeled in Day 6 and the default value example was so unrealistic as to denigrate the topic (although Liberty nicely covers the debate over whether to use default values or simply overload a method/function).
And finally, I thought that almost no instruction on the toolsets (compiler, make, etc.) was limiting. Ultimately, this omission shows you how basic this book is but given the fundamental nature and the intended audience, I think it's really a glaring omission. That said, the bit of advice he does give is confined to Microsoft's Visual product which was completely unhelpful to me using g++.
So, I can recommend the book with these caveats. This book would be a great way to prepare for additional training or to equip you to ask slightly less ignorant questions in online forums.
Editorial Review:
Join the leagues of thousands of programmers and learn C++ from some of the best. The fifth edition of the best seller Sams Teach Yourself C++ in 21 Days, written by Jesse Liberty, a well-known C++ and C# programming manual author and Bradley L. Jones, manager for a number of high profiler developer websites, has been updated to the new ANSI/ISO C++ Standard. This is an excellent hands-on guide for the beginning programmer. Packed with examples of syntax and detailed analysis of code, fundamentals such as managing I/O, loops, arrays and creating C++ applications are all covered in the 21 easy-to-follow lessons. You will also be given access to a website that will provide you will all the source code examples developed in the book as a practice tool. C++ is the preferred language for millions of developers-make Sams Teach Yourself the preferred way to learn it!
