Average Customer Review:  
| good for overview tutorial and for refreshing | |
With the 2 authoritative textbooks of C++ are ~1200 pages and ~1100 pages (the one by Lippman and Stroustrup, respectively), it's scary and discouraging for anyone who thinks of starting to learn C++. Moreover, as a professional developer who want some quick start to refresh my somewhat rusted memory of the language, I found it hard to flip over the 2 thick textbooks mentioned above.I went through "Essential C++" and in a short time, refreshed and considated key concepts of the language. For example, the chapter about exception handling gave me a quick and sufficient overview about concepts and syntax. Then when I read the book by Stroustrup, I caught up quicker and easier. However, this book will not serve as the one and only book in a professional or student's bookshelf. One will need one or both of the textbooks mentioned above to have more involving discussion. As long as we don't intend to use the book as a quick and dirty "Teach yourself C++ in 7 days", the book serves it purpose as a concise priming and refreshing text.
| highly recommended guided tour of the C++ language | |
"Essential C++" conveys the essence of C++ (hence the title :) in a very readable 200 pages. Much of the basic material I already knew pretty well but the review/reinforcement was helpful and I learned many new things about some relatively recent C++ features such as the standard template library, generic programming, function objects, templates and exceptions.This book takes a hands on approach, developing code fragments to illustrate the topics by example. It's very well organized with each chapter building on material from previous chapters. Lippman's writing is simple and straightforward with a touch of good humor. All in all a rarity - a technical book about computer programming that is well organized, full of useful information and fun to read.
| Good introductory book on C++! | |
This book takes you from C++ ground zero up to writing some fairly complicated and interesting programs in a short time. Mr. Lippman provides progressively harder problems that need to be solved, and at each stage teaches you exactly those new language elements that are needed to solve each problem, so you can understand from the beginning the usefulness (and necessity) of the language features. The example programs are interesting, and best of all, he provides answers to the programming exercises (I always love it when an author does that!), so you can practice what you're learning and get feedback on how you're doing!
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