This book is perfect for someone new to c++ programming it this book isnt as bland and boring as most programming books not that programming is boring hehe it goes more in depth than anything ive read besides accelerated c++ this book also isnt bad for people who havnt played around with c++ code for a while its more targetted for the programmer with no experience its a fine book and in my opinion worth the money.

This book has been very helpful to me. It has clear explanations, well thought out examples and the occasional bit of comic relief. I'd recommend this to anybody who's interesting in learning C++.

A friendly easy to read book that makes the intimidating task of learning how to program a lot less daunting.

This is yet another fine book that I've added to my collection. I use it mainly as a reference but it is certainly an excellent teaching guide as well. This book is replete with informative lessons and practice exercises with answers for those who are new to the C ++ programming language. I would also highly recommend it for the intermediate level individuals who wish to augment their C++ programming skills. A thorough explanation precedes each exercise so the ease of learning progressively in as little time possible is greatly enhanced. The practice exercises are very helpful and practical. Expect to take more than 21 days to become proficient if you are just starting out in C++. Well done Jesse Liberty, Bradley Jones and everyone else involved in producing this book containing over 900 pages of excellent C++ training material!

I have programmed for years but never in a modern object-oriented language and I wish to maintain a C++ project. So I purchased this book. I also searched online for "C++ tutorials". In general, I think this book is OK.

Compared to online resources, this book provides a fuller and often deeper explanation of the basics of C++. Sometimes it was too much depth (e.g., showing a picture of a fence to explain the fence-post error was not particularly needed), but you can always skip the rest of the page. I think I gained a better understanding of the use inheritance, virtual methods, and polymorphism through Liberty's examples.

I can definitively deny other reviews of this book that suggest that Liberty uses older POD arrays of pchar/char... he uses strings except late in the course where he shows an implementation of a string class. One of the things I learned from the additional material in Liberty's book is why this is controversial and why "#include " and "#include " are different. (Liberty's is a modern, "#include " book.)

The book is also full of code examples which are explained concisely (which is nice, after the first introduction of "#include " you don't need the author to explain it each time). There is a degree of review and each chapter ends with "Q&A" (kind of a short FAQ for that chapter), a quiz and some exercises. The exercises are generally split between "do this" and "debug this" items. There are answers at the back of the book.

Finally, I think OOP requires new analysis and object design skills and on-line tutorials are mostly silent about this critical issue. Liberty provides one full chapter that is quite good at providing an overview (IMHO).

My main criticism is a matter of expectations; this book teaches you A LITTLE C++. The back of the book says "you'll have all the skills you need to BEGIN programming C++" (my emphasis). You still have a considerable learning curve as you master even intermediate aspects. A good example is implementing "one class per file". In passing on day 6 Liberty explains that he is NOT showing you the way professional C++ programmers write code and he provides a single and very incomplete example of splitting your work into multiple files. Working from this, I find that I do not understand namespaces well enough from the discussion on day 18 to work with multiple files.

Also, I noticed a few errors in the book. Unless I very misunderstand, inline class methods were mislabeled in Day 6 and the default value example was so unrealistic as to denigrate the topic (although Liberty nicely covers the debate over whether to use default values or simply overload a method/function).

And finally, I thought that almost no instruction on the toolsets (compiler, make, etc.) was limiting. Ultimately, this omission shows you how basic this book is but given the fundamental nature and the intended audience, I think it's really a glaring omission. That said, the bit of advice he does give is confined to Microsoft's Visual product which was completely unhelpful to me using g++.

So, I can recommend the book with these caveats. This book would be a great way to prepare for additional training or to equip you to ask slightly less ignorant questions in online forums.