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C++ from the Beginning (International Computer Science Series)
by Jan Skansholm
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Addison Wesley Publishing Company (1997-07)
ISBN: 0201403773
EAN: 9780201403770
Dewy Decimal #: 005
Textbook Binding: 576 pages
Edition: 1st
SKU: M8430
Condition: Good
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
Covers C++ language from the simple basics to advanced language constructs. Discusses objectoriented program development and describes data structures and algorithms. Demonstrates how the new template libraries are constructed and used. Paper.
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Customer Reviews
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Maybe not for the beginner
Rating  (3)
Date: 2008-02-01
Well, I wanted to comment on this book from the perspective of someone who is a beginner to programming. I do have a little experience in HTML, Latex, and Mathematica. A friend gave me the book, saying it was the perfect book for a beginner, not requiring any prior programming knowledge. In fact, the author makes the claim "There is no onus on the reader to know C, or any other programming language for that matter." Well, here I am. I got through about the first pages of chapter 3, then I gave up (I gave it three shots). The problem is that, e.g. on the first few pages, sentences like the following are basically right next to each other:
"The diagram shows the most common input and output units for communication with people: a screen (monitor), a mouse, and a keyboard."
"All declarations in the standard libraries are done in a namespace called std."
That second sentence was not explained (instead, the author said that it would be OK not to understand this). And that would be my main point of critique: Why would you write that without explaining it? Unfortunately, after a while (for me after ca. 80 pages), these not explained things piled up and made it harder and harder to keep everything together in terms of understanding. Learning started to be no fun at all anymore because I was loosing overview.
The book is probably a good book. It seems pretty well written etc. But if you have about as much experience as I have, chances are you will get lost somewhere within the first 100 pages.
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More C'ish than C++'ish
Rating (3)
Date: 2006-04-20
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
I purchased this book for a college class in Computer Science. Being already familiar with C, I was expecting that the book would get immediately into the guts of C++, i.e. Object Oriented Programming.
Sad to say, this book spends most of the first 5 chapters attacking C++ from a C perspective. The only new C++ constucts presented early were "cin >>" and "cout <<". The first real discussion of classes isn't until page 63, where the vector, list, and deque classes are discussed as alternatives to arrays.
If you're a C programmer, you'll have no problem following the book, but then you might as well start reading at Chapter 6 (pg. 203!) although you might find yourself wondering why you had to buy the first third of the book (it's ~600 pages total) in the first place.
If you're a fresh, un-"C-tainted" programmer, learn programming from an Object Orientation first. That way you won't learn bad habits that you'll be forced to un-learn later.
jmtc
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Great learning tool.
Rating  (5)
Date: 2005-10-05
0 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
Skansholm's book is concise and pragmatic. I have read both of his work on C++ and Java and it trully a must for beginners. The book is very good explaned and all programs can be run from PCs and UNIX machines. There are tons of similiar books on the market but Skansholm's work excel in both interesting examples and academically sound.
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Good but not a reference book and lack examples.
Rating (3)
Date: 1999-04-04
2 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
I had some prior knowledge about programming concepts before reading this book and I was glad of that. Although the book covers very basic issues as well as fairly complicated issues like data encaptulation, inheritance and polymorphism I found the book to lack a lot of examples. It's my experience that only I can teach my self a given programming language through writing examples and "play" with these. The examples in the book however, are small and always assumes you've just made the prior part of an example a few pages back and that just doesn't work for me! It's not a bad book but you'll need to supplement with another book to show you more examples.
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The book is well written, but would like an answer book.
Rating  (4)
Date: 1999-01-21
1 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
I have bought many books on C++ for college courses, but this one is much easier to learn from. It gives good examples, and builds on these pieces of information to give the user a good understanding. The only suggestion would be to have a book of the exercise answers available to purchase. The course instructor is using this book for background info, and not making assignments from it, so the answers to the exercises would be helpful to my learning effort.
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