Average Customer Review:  
| Not much about STL, but a good book on C++ data structures | |
If you're looking for specifics about STL, then look onto another text. However I did find that this is one of the better books that describe data structures in an informative way and also backed up with easy to understand and decently designed classes (surprisingly I have found many of the code for other data structure books to be poorly written and obtuse). Doesn't go discuss some of the more interesting data structures such as RB trees, etc. If they come up with a sequel that does, I would gladly buy it. But it does cover the basics quite well.
I used this book in a Data Structures course, and it turned out to go pretty well. It covers all of the data structures in the STL (vectors, queues, strings, lists, etc.) in addition to some things not implemented (trees, hashes, etc.).The nice thing about this book is for each data structure, it broke it up into two sections. A look at how it was implemented in the STL and also a look at the interface and how to use it, along with examples. In our course, we focused on how to use it (why reinvent the wheel), but it was nice to know how it works as well. Budd also provides a nice quick sheet for each structure so when you are writing programs, you can refer to it and know immediately how to use that structure. Be forewarned, some of his code has errors. You can download fixes for some at his website (listed in the book). Not all code has fixes on his website, but you should be able to fix them yourself after reading the book. One final note, I was able to use most of the code in this book with both MS Visual C++ 5 and Borland C++ 5 with only minor modifications.
|
