Rating: 
Summary: THE RAMBLER REVIEW
Review: I bought this book thinking it was for a beginner. However, I was unpleasantly surprised to find that this author teaches this subject much like some of the poor professors at colleges I know. They talk at you instead of helping you understand the subject. Once you sift through the many instances of dry humor, pomp and circumstance, you are left with an empty feeling that you have missed something.
At first I though it was just me. However, after many re-reads of chapters, I found that this author continually rambles about one subject then abruptly moves to another in his examples. He then proceeds to further confuse you by mixing in other mathematical concepts that add noise to understanding what he meant to say in the first place.
I would not recommend this book to a beginner, as this author makes every attempt to elude the concept of a beginner's book by adding worthless blather and his knowledge of other subjects to an already complicated subject. Add to that poorly written examples that ultimately add more confusion by adding unnecessary unexplained concepts, and you have the worst beginner's book I have read in awhile. This author's book, at best, has an intermediate audience in mind. However, even they would need to be suffering from ADD to follow this author's thought patterns.
Rating: 
Summary: detailed
Review: Ivor Horton has an exceptional talent for organizing and presenting C++ that makes it easy to learn. This is a very difficult lanuage, but if you persist, you will learn with his book. It is the best C++ learner book I have found. He leads you through each chapter expanding on the previous. It is slow going at first because you need to know so many things to begin programming. It becomes easy after you get half way through the book and all the pieces of the puzzle start coming together.
Rating:
Summary: Great Way To Get Started.
Review: This book is written quite well for some one who wants to learn C++ from the ground up. It starts with a good No Nonsense procedural approach to C/C++ and then on to an Object Oriented view then works into windows programming and even a bit on database access with C++. Very nice way to start. Bottom Line absolute a ton of Info Presented in a easy to read and understand way. No Extra words like you would get from a college textbook so they could charge more for the text and a ton of info because the author is trying to teach you completely instead of teach you programming 101 and 102. Obviously as one progresses with C++ more books would be required. After you get through the procedural and Object Oriented part of this book I would plan on buying a book which teaches you other important aspects of programming such as Data structures, and Parsing. Read that while moving on to the windows part of the book. Not that it's at all needed to understand the "windows" half of the books but it stuff that all programmers should know.
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