Rating: 
Summary: BIG book, CHEAP book, GREAT book
Review: I'm a student and the book we are using in class (C++ From the Beginning by Jan Skansholm) I find difficult to read and EXTREMELY hard to use as a tutorial as well as a reference book. Ivar Hortons Beginning C++ however is easy to read and follow and comes with lots of examples! (I learn by example, don't you?) I spent almost a week of intense searching for the "right" book that could teach me C++ (There are a lot of C++ books out there) and I'm so glad I picked this one. The only "downside" is that you'll need a fairly new compiler (MS VC++ 5.0/6.0) although you'll certainly benifit from the books explanations even if you can't use the newest features. I just wish I had bought this book bofore.
Rating:
Summary: Not just for beginners!
Review: I've been programming C++ for several years and browsing through Ivor's book found refreshing perspectives on several programming elements. His treatment is very clear and for the most part consise. An excellent book for fundamental reference.
Rating:
Summary: As good as it gets...
Review: If I add even a word, it is only the redundancy.....
Rating:
Summary: I really like it
Review: If this book had come out 4 years ago, I wouldn't have stopped programming in C++. I took programming in high school but the books we used were so boring and stale, I hated programming.Now I pick up this book, wow, this book makes programming fun! The book is clear and has lots of examples and he fully explains every line in the examples too. He gives you a few projects to do at the end of each chapter which are interesting and fun to do. Since I used to program in C++, I can honestly say if someone asked me what a good book would be to buy to start programming I would recommend this one. It starts from the beginning and works upward at a good pace. My C++ knowledge had obviously rusted completely over after four years, however this book very quickly brought it back into focus. This book hands down is awesome.
Rating:
Summary: Good book for people who like C++. Gives a strong base.
Review: If you want to have a strong foundation in C++ read this book. All major C++ concepts are explained in detail. This book will reduce the number of situations where you feel, "AHH!!! Why wont this code work, my syntax and logic is perfect", because it is crammed full of even the most minor (yet very important in some cases) information.
If you are serious about C++ programming and want to start windows programming and/or game programming or any API/SDK programming this book is for you. However if you are not serious about programming with C++ find another book, because the author does go into detail on every topic. If you don't like C++ you may become bored.
P.S.
I must warn you sometimes the authors coding style may be difficult for true beginners to understand. Don't let this sway you, just keep at it and reread the code and explanations several times.
Rating:
Summary: Good book for people who like C++. Gives a strong base.
Review: If you want to have a strong foundation in C++ read this book. All major C++ concepts are explained in detail. This book will reduce the number of situations where you feel, "AHH!!! Why wont this code work, my syntax and logic is perfect", because it is crammed full of even the most minor (yet very important in some cases) information.
If you are serious about C++ programming and want to start windows programming and/or game programming or any API/SDK programming this book is for you. However if you are not serious about programming with C++ find another book, because the author does go into detail on every topic. If you don't like C++ you may become bored.
P.S.
I must warn you sometimes the authors coding style may be difficult for true beginners to understand. Don't let this sway you, just keep at it and reread the code and explanations several times.
Rating: 
Summary: BEWARE - OLD MATERIAL
Review: It looks to me as though this edition is just a rewrite of Horton's previous edition. This book covers the ansi/iso std. of 1998, not the current standard. They seem to have put a new cover on the book and raised the price. BAD, BAD, BAD!!!!
The same applies to his new "Beginning C Programming". This has no reference to the new C99 standard at all.
Rating: 
Summary: Frustrating
Review: Ivar Horton may be an experienced programmer but he certainly isn't a great teacher. Having some experience with COBOL I purchased this book hoping to teach myself C++. The first couple of chapters cover very basic stuff and are easy to understand, but then Mr.Horton jumps to Bitwise Operators in chapter 3. This is incredibly confusing and complicated stuff for just the 3rd chapter, before you even learn about the IF statement. I am now learning about classes, constructors and operator overloading and I still have no idea what he was talking about in chapter 3. Moreover, Mr.Horton fails to explain WHY some of the things he explains should be used in the first place. Another thing I found very frustrating was not being able to follow his examples with programs of my own. For example, after reading about strings I tried to create my own program which would modify a cin>> string to uppercase and output it as cout<< After wrestling with errors for about 4 hours I finally gave up on it, only to find out later that the expression toupper() returns an integer and has to be converted to char by static_cast first. Looking back through the chapters I found a very brief one-line mention of this. This is a very big deal, and he should have explained it in a lot more detail. I can give you tons of such examples, where he fails to point out the restraints of the code used in his own examples. Going back to strings, after using cin>>string, he doesn't tell the reader that this can only accept one word. Only later does he mention that, "by the way", in order to output a whole sentence you have to use getline(cin,string). At this point I had to ask myself why he had used that example before explaining the whole concept. Overall the book is not entirely confusing. Some of the chapters are well written and helpful, I just wish the author had a better understanding of how beginners learn code. I wish he didn't use complicated code when trying to explain simple concepts and that he finnished explaining an entire concept before jumping to an example.
Rating:
Summary: The best book for Beginner
Review: IVOR HORTON has written an EXTRAORDINARY book, that can teach ANYBODY to programming C++. This book provides a very solid foundation for beginners in understanding C++. If you want to learn from the ground up how to programming in C++, this is the best book for you.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely great!
Review: Ivor Horton's easy teaching style is perfect for those of us who have little experience of the programming world. The exercises were simple to follow, and being able to find the errata and source code online at the Wrox Press site was most useful. Will definitely investigate the other books by this author during my attempts to become a programmer, and master C++ and Java!
| 
