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Some good points and some not so good

Customer Rating:

Many of the reviews of this book mention the background of the reviewer. If you are considering learning C++ from this book, I suggest you consider carefully the reviews by those with a background close to yours. Pay less attention to those with a substantially different background. But. read this review because I will try to offer several different perspectives. I earned my living from 1960 to my recent retirement programming digital computers of many kinds, in many languages, and for many applications, including about 15 years using C. I used this text in a just finished C++ course as part of my "mind rot delay program." I knew some things about C++, but had not used it. The instructor has taught the course for many years, and I believe has used the same text for several years. It seems to have passed the test of time for that environment. The second sentence of the preface states "No previous programming experience is required." The school requires either a two semester sequence of C programming, or a one semester C course for those with previous programming experience. The instructor said those without a solid background in C would be lost. I do not know anything about the other students in the class, but almost half were gone by the final night. One of the good things about this book is the large number of complete sample programs. These illustrate and demonstrate features of the language. You don't even have to type them in; you can get them from the publisher's web site. One of the bad things about this book is the large number of complete sample programs. Often the portion of interest is two or three lines out of a page or two. The book is much larger than it could be. There are a few questions in the text, but not many. There are no problem sets or review questions to test your understanding. At the end of a few chapters there is a suggestion to review certain topics. There are frequent suggestions to play with a program, make changes and understand what happens. Almost all the provided programs are complete in one file. Real C++ applications are usually file intensive, even more so than applications written in C. Even toy homework problems from my class often involved five or seven files. The book is remarkably complete for a work aimed at novices. There are omissions, but most are minor. Some reviewers, and my instructor, said the coverage of member initialization lists is particularly weak. The Standard Template Library (STL) is one of the newer features of the language. It is covered in the longest chapter of the book, 46 pages. Other reviewers have complained that the coverage is scant. They are right. It is scant. The chapter is called "Introducing the Standard Template Library." The book explains a few of the container classes and a few of the operations you can do on them. The explanations are at a level similar to the rest of the book. It is enough to get you started. Similar operations on other container classes have similar names. There are several lists of function names with very brief descriptions. For an introduction, it is adequite. My instructor said it would take more than a semester to cover the entire STL. I think that would be a very dull class. Look through the STL from time to time; perhaps you will notice something that seems useful. Then learn the immediately useful parts. Here is a tip that I learned the hard way. The functions listed in the ALGORITHMS section of the STL are not member functions. You can tell if you study the sample program closely enough, but it is not clear from the main text. The preface promises you (the novice) will be an accomplished C++ programmer when you finish the book. I disagree. You may know a lot about details of the language, but the book will not help you design a solution to a problem. Not recommended for a novice. If you have some experience programming in some language, the book could be useful. Read it while you rework the problems from your old text, using C++. Warning: I'm not a teacher; this is just my suspicion. The current edition is the Third Edition. Some of the reviews here seem to be of an earlier edition. The Third Edition was published in 2003. That is long ago for many computer books, but the C++ standard has not changed since 1998, except for some corrections in 2003. Most of the changes for the next version of the standard are expected to apply only to the library.

Really, really good

Customer Rating:

Programmers-in-training have this nasty, nasty tendency to purchase a slew of books only to leave half (or more!) of them virtually (if not literally!) untouched. I am such a culprit -- I bought quite a few C++ books, including this one, when I started out, but left it collecting dust on my bookshelf. However, when I'd been away from programming for a while and wanted to relearn C++, I decided to give this book a read. I'm glad that I did. The book is geared toward those with some conception of programming and how programming languages are used (I still remembered a bit o' C++, but nothing quite fancy), so I didn't find myself bored out of my mind when reading the initial 10 or so chapters on the C subset of C++ (which, I may add, are extremely well written and have practical examples -- like a bubblesort!) Then when I got to the chapters on OOP (of which I recalled almost nothing), I found myself in for a real treat. Everything was lucidly explained coupled with an ample number of full example programs to aid in understanding. I particularly liked the sample programs because they tended to be serious and were overall very, very useful and facilitated learning rather than obstruct it. If you're just coming off of a language like BASIC, Java, or C#, then I reccomend this book wholeheartedly -- you'll be programming C++ like there's no tomorrow within a reasonably short time. If you're a programming neophyte, you can probably go through the book and be fine -- but be prepared to work, experiment, and practice (although you'd do that anyway -- just moreso if you're a newbie). So, yeah, excellent book; definitely worth buying.

I don't recommend this book for beginners learning C++

Customer Rating:

In my quest to find a really good teaching guide to learn C++ from scratch I was quite attracted to the title of this book. I checked out the author's credentials and thought this book would be an excellent way to get started. I wanted to "Learn C++ from the Master", as is written on the top right corner of the book for me to plainly see. I personally do not think that the title "C++ from the GROUND UP" is an appropriate one by any means. I found it hard to learn the basics of C++ programming using this book. I didn't find much in the way of detailed teachings to go along with the code examples. As an example, when writing my first program it would have been nice to know something about "headers" other than just the fact that they are necessary or useful for the program. Many more pages of explanations are needed for this book to be "beginner friendly". After all, this book boasts on page XVII that no previous programming experience is required. Now, I have had prior experience albeit many years ago, with C and Pascal. I found this book quite tedious to work through. I think many essential explanations / examples were lacking before advancing to, and running, various types of program code. After struggling through this book all the way to chapter four I got frustrated and invested in C++ Primer Plus, Fifth edition after checking several reviews. It would have been helpful to have more practice exercises with answers. The cost of this book is too high for what you get, ( I paid $59.95 CDN on the date of my purchase, although I see the price has diminished ). There is much, better value out there for your money if you investigate. On a positive note, I think the code examples do demonstrate excellent programming syntax and structure. I also believe that the book's description is correct about the fact that the author is a Master Windows Programmer, etc. I will use the examples of code shown in this book eventually. I would like to get some more use out of it. To sum it all up in a sentence: Had I known back then what I know now about this book, I would never have purchased it.

good examples	Customer Rating:
The book was easy to read and the examples were clear. Came in a very timely manner

Great text for beginning C++ programmers

Customer Rating:

I learned C++ programming from the first edition of this book, and browsing through the 3rd edition it seems that the quality is just as high as that first edition from which I learned the language years ago. Schildt excels at teaching by keeping the concepts simple and straightforward. If you hope to learn object oriented programming from this book, by the way, you will not. This is strictly a book for learning the language. The only negative thing I can say about the book is that the last three chapters that have been added since the first edition on more advanced topics are rather thin and seem tacked on. Regardless of that, I would highly recommend this book to anyone thinking about learning C++. I notice that the table of contents is not shown by Amazon, so I show that here for the purpose of completeness: 1: The Story of C++ 2: An Overview of C++ 3: The Basic Data Types 4: Program Control Statements 5: Arrays and Strings 6: Pointers 7: Functions, Part One: The Fundamentals 8: Functions, Part Two: References, Overloading, and Default Arguments 9: More Data Types and Operators 10: Structures and Unions 11: Introducing the Class 12: A Closer Look at Classes 13: Operator Overloading 14: Inheritance 15: Virtual Functions and Polymorphism 16: Templates 17: Exception Handling 18: The C++ I/O System 19: Run-Time Type ID and the Casting Operators 20: Namespaces and Other Advanced Topics 21: Introducing the Standard Template Library 22: The C++ Preprocessor A: C-Based I/O B: Working with an Older C++ Compiler C: The .NET Managed Extensions to C++