Visual C++.Net: How to Program

I find Deitel to be a good author. I've used this book, C#, Visual Basics 6.0 and others. They are all well written and sometimes you can learn more from the Deitel book stand alone then in a college course. Note all Visual Microsoft software have free downloads.

I think this is a great book. I learn best in a "classroom" environment while doing lots of hands-on exercises. This book meets both of these needs. The material is presented in a logical manner that makes sense and the book is inundated with example code for hands-on work. When I received my book, there was some problems with some of the pages. I contacted the Deitel company and was impressed with how quickly and professionally they responded to my problem. When I have a need for books on programming, they will be the place I look first for resources.

This book is a very nice choice for learning .NET 1.1 programming with C++, provided that you have enough knowledge of the C++ language itself (as always is the case when programming with C++ in some platform).

The first thing I noticed about this text is the absence of the familiar colour coding used throughout the other volumes. Could this be a sign of publisher wariness, or simply cost cutting? The book has much in common (including examples) with the other Deitel and Deitel .Net (C#, VB) volumes. Chapter development and layout is very similar. The standard of the material is mostly very good as one would expect, but topic coverage leaves something to be desired. Firstly, it's a personal opinion, but I am not convinced that the several hundred pages devoted to web services is what students of C++ (and new professionals) need or want. Consequently, I ask myself whether this space should be shunted into a separate book. Secondly, there is a very small amount of space devoted to data structures, roughly 53 pages. Much smaller than needs be given the overall size of the book. Moreover, the reader only gets to data structures after 1000 pages of text. This apparent underemphasis on data structures raised a variety questions in my mind about the software engineering philosophy of the text. Thirdly, the book explicitly avoids dealing with ActiveX and COM. Attributes, a new feature in Visual C++ are mentioned in passing, and ATL is not mentioned at all.Overalll, I am less postive about this book than their earlier proramming in C++ text. It seemed to me from reading the book, that there is a formula at play and material is shoehorned to fit accordingly. I fully acknowledge that much of the material is excellent and competently explained, but as an overall learning text on VC++.Net I think improvements are required.