I have gone through a little over half of this book so far, and I feel I need
to write a review based on a few things I have seen.
- The book is very well organized. It starts from absolute basics, and builds
on everything from there. This makes going from chapter to chapter very easy.
- Some of the examples are very easy, and others are not. You do not want a
book that does everything for you. You might get stuck for hours, but in the end
you will learn something, which leads me to...
- The downside of this book (actually I noticed that could be debatable), is
the number of typos in the examples of code. You can tell that the editors did
catch all the copy-paste mistakes as they were made quite a bit. But sometimes I
sat for hours wondering why my code wouldn't compile only to realize he made a
typo mistake. One of them I remember is when he had done a 'switch' statement,
he left out the integer expression... and being a newbie, it takes awhile to
catch. And he confuses his pointer names A LOT, naming one pt then switching
to pn. The up-side to this is you will be fixing people's code in the real world,
debugging, etc... so that's how I look at it. But frustrating nonetheless.
- Sometimes it isn't quite clear how he is explaining a certain point, but
after thinking about it a bit, it starts to make sense later, usually in examples
or when he explains other ways of doing it. For the most part, the explanations
are pretty good.
Bottom-line, the standard hasn't changed too much since this edition so unless
you want to fish out top-dollar for the 6th edition that is out now, this one
will do fine; I got mine new for $10 shipped.
I actually started with Java as my first language and classes, objects, etc
didn't make too much sense until I studied them in C++ from this book... I
recommend studying C++ as a first language rather than Java like most schools
and universities do as Java is a more higher level language than C++, meaning
it has a little more abstraction level, however in theory Java is 'easier' to C++.
Just that C++ answered all my problems I had with Java.