Understanding Programming: An Introduction to Using C++

Each year we revisit the question of what text to teach Programming I from. For the past three years, we settled on this one, though with some reservations. Its approach of quickly giving the student enough to write interesting programs works pretty well, though a few more constructs could be included earlier (such as constants, and ints). My preference is also to delay teaching objects to novice programmers until the student has at least a basic grasp of structured programming ideas, and Cannon does that.On the other hand, the treatment of strings is rather poor, and a student who wants to go on in programming is advised to supplement this text with an additional reference, as the text is not as complete as it might be.Overall, Cannon does a reasonable job of teaching the basic ideas of structured programming to a novice programmer. If the book leaves you wanting more, you will then be able to move on to a more thorough text with confidence.

This book seems to have been written primarily as a college text. It offers thoughful insite to the absolute basics which is refreshing since many texts on this subject often assume that the reader has at least an intermediate knowledge of programming. Buy this book before moving on to "Teach Yourself C in 21 Days" . As a budding programmer myself, I highly recommend this book.Jsalas