Big C++

I don't know what some of these reviewers are talking about when they say that this book is not for beginners. The author starts out very slowly, covering in almost ten chapters and with numerous examples the parts of C++ that are virtually the same as C. It is not until late into the book that he hits upon GUIs, the standard template library, exception handling, and XML. I like the book because it covers so much and covers it so well. I'd highly recommend it to anyone who is a novice C++ programmer, or even someone with experience who wants a good example-based reference and some material on the more advanced parts of C++ to boot. If you've read Mr. Horstmann's "Core Java" series of books, you know what to look forward to - a book that starts at the beginning but does not sacrifice details for a slow take-off approach. Highly recommended.

This book covers what you need to to start writing C++. It is a great book both for beginners and people who are new to C++. It is also a very useful reference for more advanced developers.

the book came in the condition it was supposed to. the delivery time was also very prompt.

This is an excellent textbook written by knowledgeable authors. Horstmann teaches at San Jose State University in California. He has in-depth knowledge of C++, having written the Safe STL library. He also writes for the Sun Core Java series of books. Although the book is large, it can be used for a 2 or 3 semester sequence of courses in software development using C++. After covering fundamentals, the authors cover advanced topics with modern relevance. Chapter 13 on Object-Oriented Design discusses the software development life cycle, Class-Responsibility-Collaboration using CRC cards, and gives practical tips for implementing class associations. Other advanced topics include templates (similar to generics), the C++ Standard Template Library, design patterns, GUI's, Relational Databases (using MySQL), and XML. Appendices cover C++ Language Coding Guidelines, and legacy C/C++ topics. The authors' writing style is very clear and easy for college freshmen to understand. The Random Facts sections help make the textbook interesting, and cover topics such as: Computing History, the First Bug, the Therac-25 bug (an ethical issue), the Ariane Rocket incident, etc. Sample code can be found at the author's website at: http://www.horstmann.com/bigcpp.html and also at the Wiley publisher higher education website: http://he-cda.wiley.com/WileyCDA/ (search by author for Horstmann). The book is well organized with a good set of end-of-chapter exercises, programming problems, and references for further reading. We have adopted this textbook for a 2-sequence course in object-oriented software development. I highly recommend it.

Lots of examples, very easy to follow along. A big downside that I noticed is that there is no website for the book to find the necessary libraries for the examples. I now found that I can find them on the site of the previous book the author wrote. After wich I had to find more libraries wich were either missing or incomplete. This come down to skipping chapter 3 and subsequent programming exercises that require the knowledge gained from chapte 3. Very frustrading, but I hope that that the author will create the site soon, making this a 5/5 book. Great otherwise.