C++ Primer (Paperback)

#1: Contents (5): This book is the most comprehensive tutorial style books available. The contents are presented in no-fluff, succit style. Instead of just explaining the concepts, the author focuses on the possible pitfalls and critical details. I also like the comments on compatibility issues.

#2: Writing Style (3): I will give 3-stars for writing style because the book lacks the conversational tone. It presents a lot of details at once. ALso, the book is very "textbook" type and the style make it somewhat hard to follow inspite of its excellent contents.

#3 Organization (1). I agree with most other reviewers who think that the book suffer from poor organization. The authors are trying to make their book a tutorial and a reference at the same time and it clearly fails to fit in either camp. The author jumps around alot with a huge number of cross references and presents many concept without explaining them. This make this book very unsuitable for beginners with a little programming experience.

#4: Examples (4): C++ primer is one of the few books with decent practice problem. The examples are usually short and to the point and successfully avoid the unnecessary clutter. However, most are code snippets instead of complete working programs and usually donot touch realworld problems.

#5: Audience (2): The book claims to be suitable for both beginners and experienced programmers. In my opinion, for beginners this book can be very frustrating.

Overall (5): Inspite of its shortcomming, i give this book
5-star because its worth your money. This is one book that will become your all time favourite reference once you get comfortable with the language.

The book is laid out in approximately 17 different chapters which are then divided into an average of 9-15 sections. Each chapter is focused on one key subject such as the begining steps and more advanced techniques to use your code. Within those chapters you have each section slowly explaining in detail what each bit of code you're seeing is doing.

Now as I've said before, this book explains every bit of code in detail, but this doesn't mean that this book isn't for just beginners. The books cover states that over 48,000 programmers have learned the coding language from beginners to more advanced.

About every other page contains tips and secrets to successful coding which stand out in gray boxes. Some of the most smallest things are mentioned here such as how comments work in your code to how your code should be formatted. These tips will help you inprove your coding habits very much.

Now you're probably thinking, "This is just another one of those reviews which show each good part of the book. It's not like they're going to give me any info on weak parts of the book!", Well in fact you're wrong. This book isn't all positive. There's some parts in this book which can be very annoying such as lacking a glossary of needed terms even though most terms are put in bold print. There are very good examples of code in this book, but not all of them are the most interesting. Reading this book can be very monotonous at times because of the lack of different things they mention you can code or give you examples of code.

How about the strong points? In depth explanations, great examples, great tips, need I say more? This book has a lot of good points to it, there are very few weak points. I would recommend this book to anyone wanting a good C++ reference manual.