Program Development and Design Using C++

Rating:
Summary: Identical to Bronson's "A First Book of C++: From Here to Th
Review: If, like me, you already own Bronson's "A First Book of C++: From Here to There" there is no need to purchase this book. The two books are almost identical. The chapters are rearranged, but not much difference between the two. Even the wording is the same! I recommend buying one or the other of the two books, as Bronson can explain C++ on the beginner's level. Very easy to understand with good examples. I have recommended "A First Book of C++..." to many of my college classmates and they all enjoyed the simplicity of the book.

Rating:
Summary: Identical to Bronson's "A First Book of C++: From Here to Th
Review: If, like me, you already own Bronson's "A First Book of C++: From Here to There" there is no need to purchase this book. The two books are almost identical. The chapters are rearranged, but not much difference between the two. Even the wording is the same! I recommend buying one or the other of the two books, as Bronson can explain C++ on the beginner's level. Very easy to understand with good examples. I have recommended "A First Book of C++..." to many of my college classmates and they all enjoyed the simplicity of the book.

Rating:
Summary: easy to read
Review: many typo error. where is the study guide? answers to excerise are far few and in between.

Rating:
Summary: Good, not great
Review: Strengths: The book is clearly written.
Weaknesses: The excersizes are generally not very imaginative, some are pointlessly repetitive. The author is misguided, IMHO, in delaying the introduction to the (unpleasant enough) topic of pointers. I don't think you can properly teach arrays and strings first. These subjects just make more sense if their basis, i.e., pointers, is introduced first.
Now for some particulars:
p. 129: Set isoflags is used in the program, while the text uses setiosflags. Confusing, particularly since this is the first introduction to the idea of output formatting.
p. 348: I believe that should be "factorial(n-1)" in the return statement of the recursive function. (See the pseudocode above it, which is clear enough!)
p. 366: Excersize 11 makes sense for strings; but we won't know strings for another few chapters.
p. 377: Problem 12 doesn't make sense to me.
p. 394: The first full paragraph describes how the list in Program 7.1 is shaded; it is incorrect.
p. 407: Problem 5 explicitly calls for the use of arrays, which won't be discussed until several chapters later.
p. 419: As an example of unimaginative problems, see. problem 7.
On the same page, problem 8. c. #3 requires the use of arrays.
Also, C++ is written "C+".
On the same page, Problem 9 requires strings.
p. 432: More unimaginative problems. A programmer could get repetitive stress injury doing and these!
p. 441: "addread" should read "addreal" in problem 3. a.
p. 450: More unimaginative problems.
p. 454: Problem 4 is too dumbed-down. Why not use complex multiplication?
p. 460: the list includes:
cout< <The problem here is with the semicolon.
p. 464: I have an indication that
"int gallons(void) (return(3+rand()%21;);" is wrong at "3+rand()," but I forgot why.
p. 472: I have a notation about pump.h being missing in the first problem, which refers to Progarm 8.13.
p. 494: I have a notation that "this" is missing in the Date constructor and in showdate(). I forget what the issue was.
p. 497: I have a notation for Problem 4 that we needed "#include manip."
p. 539: I have some notations that seem to indicate that the solutions which are provided have errors. In general, it there are frequently minor discrepancies in the way, for example, variables' names are written, e.g. myWord vs. my_word.
p. 556: Thus, in Program 10.9, on the disk, newMaster is written new_master.
p. 558: 6. b. struck me as jargony.
p. 596: Problem 6 involves sorting. Is this appropriate at this point of the book?
p. 616: on the last line of the page, "moves" is repeated, while it is not repeated on the disk. Also: There are extra iterations performed.
p. 626: Problem 3 a. presupposes a knowledge of pointers; this is yet to come.
p. 627: Problem 6 involves a variable-sized array.
p. 633: This is really petty, but on the second to last line, it should read "\0" and not '\0'; double quotes are refered to on the top of the next page. (On the other hand, '\0' seems to be the standard notation at least in this book.)
p. 642: Shaded?
p. 643: Problem 1. a. neglects upper-case vowels. But they are vowels, too!
p. 645: In the example for strtok, isn't the closing double-quote missing?
p. 651: precision and fixed should be set in Program 12.7.
p. 659: In the last line of the first paragraph, it should read "Appendix G" and not "Appendix D."
p. 671: The first full paragraph is jumbled. The sentence "For simple...preferred" should be put at the end of the paragraph.
p. 702: Problem 4 refers to Program 13.13; it should say so.
p. 724: Another inconsistency between disk and book: PayRecord vs. Pay_Record.
p. 725. What is etiosflags? (Third to last line of the first paragraph.)
On the same page, in problem 2. a., an "array" is named convert(). It should be a function.
p. 742: What is "buffered input?"
p. 745: It might be helpful in explaining the use of "MAXRECS-1" that the last entry is NULL.
p. 746: Problem 1 on the disk has an error.
pp. 785-786: On 785, the author writes ++i; in the actual program, he has i++.

I'm sure I've contributed my share of error in the above:-) Anyway, I hope this is useful for the publisher (whose website and textbooks contain no space for feed-back....)

Rating:
Summary: An also-ran
Review: This book is OK, but not outstanding. First, what I liked about it: the layout is quite nice, and there are several exercises with solutions to some of the problems. The exercises make good homework questions for students.

On the down side, the book is not up to date with the '98 standard ( for example, it uses the old #include <header.h> style, and the deprecated and error-prone strstream class ), which is inexcusable for a book published in 2000. It does not cover any of the standard library (except streams). Not only does it fail to cover the string class, but it wastes time discussing the MFC string class. It discusses linked lists without explaining the list class.

Overall, this book not only makes the (all-too-common) mistake of neglecting the standard library and forcing students to use a very primitive C-like version of the language; but also it is not comprehensive enough, and most students will need to purchase another book.

For a book that does a better job of presenting material in an appropriate order, see "accelerated C++". For a beginners book that is reasonably comprehensive, see Dietel and Dietel's "C++ how to program".

Rating:
Summary: good, solid beginner book
Review: This is a good, sound introduction to problem solving and program development using C++. It's not exhaustive, but it wasn't intended to be. It's intention was to give the reader / student a solid introduction to the items I mentioned and for that, it is great.

Master the topics in this book, & then move on to more in depth studies of data structures, etc.

Rating:
Summary: Not too pleasing
Review: This was used as our primary text book for two semesters of programming. Overall, it was relatively disappointing. The text is a good introductory text, as the reader progresses through the book, harder concepts become poorly explained. For example, his explanation on Object Oriented Programming is subpar. He relies more on definitions and less in explaining them, making abstracting OOP concepts more difficult. If you're new to C++ and have no background in programming, I would recommend this book up and until OOP, for that pick up another book.

Rating:
Summary: Not too pleasing
Review: This was used as our primary text book for two semesters of programming. Overall, it was relatively disappointing. The text is a good introductory text, as the reader progresses through the book, harder concepts become poorly explained. For example, his explanation on Object Oriented Programming is subpar. He relies more on definitions and less in explaining them, making abstracting OOP concepts more difficult. If you're new to C++ and have no background in programming, I would recommend this book up and until OOP, for that pick up another book.

Rating:
Summary: Pretty Good for Starters
Review: We used this in my Problem Solving and Programming Class. I found it to have really useful glossaries and and sample code for use within my C++ programs. Get this!

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