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Summary: Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours by Jessie Liberty
Review: "Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours" by Jessie Liberty is an excellent tool for use in learning this difficult subject.The author's program examples are clear and easily related to real-world programming applications. Program application themes he uses are carried throughout the book. Example program code is line-numbered for reference in the follow-up explanatory text. Each example is followed by a representation of the output which would be yielded by execution of the program.
This systematic approach is a tremendous aid to understanding. Other books on this topic I have used contained an occasional typo in the sample code, which can be very confusing to a novice student.
I didn't encounter any such problems in Mr. Liberty's book. This book has been a very valuable aid to me.
I look forward to other programming tutorials by this author.
Rating:
Summary: Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours by Jessie Liberty
Review: "Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours" by Jessie Liberty is an excellent tool for use in learning this difficult subject. The author's program examples are clear and easily related to real-world programming applications. Program application themes he uses are carried throughout the book. Example program code is line-numbered for reference in the follow-up explanatory text. Each example is followed by a representation of the output which would be yielded by execution of the program.
This systematic approach is a tremendous aid to understanding. Other books on this topic I have used contained an occasional typo in the sample code, which can be very confusing to a novice student.
I didn't encounter any such problems in Mr. Liberty's book. This book has been a very valuable aid to me.
I look forward to other programming tutorials by this author.
Rating:
Summary: Excellenet book for readers with some programming experience
Review: Before I start saying what I think, I should give you my background. Without letting you know that, I believe my opinions will be of little use. I have a Master's Degree in electrical engineering, a few courses about programming principles behind me, and a few years of real-life programming experience with Pascal, VB, and a number of scripting languages (ASP, PHP). So some experience, but not too much. I found this book to be one of the best books about a programming language I have read so far. It is divided into clearly defined chapters, which progressively expand your knowledge. It is not overly written, meaning that different concepts are explained in a concise manner, and then demonstrated through examples. The examples are not too simple, but neither are they overly complicated. There is always a good analysis after every example, drawing attention to the important parts of the code. I appreciated that very much. Some books spend chapter after chapter explaining what an array or a class is. I do not need that, nor should there be any need for that. Jesse Liberty uses 20 pages to explain arrays in C++. I think that if you still need more pages, perhaps a slower paced and more detailed book is more appropriate (like "Beginning C++" by Ivor Horton).
Also, this is by no means a book to end all books. It gives you the core of C++, and I also have a more detailed book, a book about data modeling, etc. If you have some programming experience, and want a relatively quick and concise introduction to the concepts of C++ this is the book for you. Jesse Liberty is good, and I will consider his books in the future, whatever programming language I may be looking into. On the other hand if you are new to programming, maybe you should go with something else.
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Summary: Easy Start
Review: Gets you off to a great start with C++.
[Includes in a compiler that was especially helpful]
Rating: 
Summary: waste of money
Review: I bought the book and when I put in the CD I was unable to use the program because I have to wait for the compiler to be emailed to me or mailed to me. I bought the book 2 weeks ago and still have not received the information so I can learn the program.
Rating: 
Summary: More like C- -
Review: I have about 30 years of Fortran programming experience plus many years in Matlab, Cobol, and Assembly Language. I found this book not very helpful. I think C++ is innately a clumsy and awkward programming language and this book doesn't shed much light on how to become proficient in it. Like one other reviewer I found the book hard sledding after Chapter 5. I was constantly flipping back to earlier chapters and re-reading definitions. The examples are entirely too simple minded and the reader would have been better served if they were short, uncomplicated business or engineering algorithms. The strength of the book is that each chapter is laid out in similar fashion which makes the book fairly readable. But given the complexity of the subject being readable doesn't necessarily make the subject matter understandable. C++ may be a powerful and elegant language but this book does a lousy job of convincing the reader it is worth learning. After 24 hours, the reader is more likely to be confused rather than educated.
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Summary: Very frustrating
Review: I only write reviews when I get extremly furstrated and right now I wish I could throw the book in the authors face. This is how I feel after going through the first chapter. The author makes you think he is telling you every step. On page 9 I find that I cannot reproduce any of his results on the debugger. I must have spent an hour trying to find my mistake. Then on page 10 he says : "One word of warning: Do not forget to compile before you try to run or debug. " Why didn't he say this up front before leading the reader through the steps that don't work. I then find that my hello-world program won't display anything. After an hour of again trying to find my mistake, my 14 year old son comes home and explains that I need two of the statements that the author very emphatically said on page 9 to "remove completely". Sure enough, putting them back in worked great. I then notice that the author states that the PAUSE statment that he so clearly said should be removed was there to permit you to see the output of your programs. DUH! He then says that "in the meantime you might find it helpful to run your programs from a command prompt in order to see your program's output. Duh again! How can he descibe seeing the output as helpful. I seems absolutely crucial to me, but hey, I am a pragmatist. Apparetnly to him if it runs it is good enough. No need to see it run. Even worse, he never explains what "to run your programs from a command prompt" means. I know where the command prompt is but that didn't work either. I know the computer savvy people think all this is all obvious, but they probably don't need this book either. This is supposed to be a step-by-step book. I really am wondering if I should waste my time trying to untangle Chapter 2.
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Summary: Somewhat dissapointed...
Review: I'm afraid I have to disagree with the review saying that this was a good way to start programming in C++, and makes no assumptions on the level of experience of the reader.
I've been programming a while, and just wanted the book as a handy guide since I don't do much in C++, but I will be in the future.
Instead of my usual "flick to the relevant section" treatment that I often do with new programming books, I decided to take the sensible approach, and work my way through the book as it was meant. Despite this, I found several concepts to be presented in an unhelpful order, and one-line examples being given, without the surrounding context, which is needed to test out and implement the new ideas.
I'll just give one example; in hour three 'enumerated constants' are introduced. There is no mention of the 'simple' method that effectively just creates several constants at once, but instead shows only a single line of code, which creates a new 'enumerated data type'.
Without any surrounding code a new learner, having just learned how to define ordinary constants, might try long and hard to get this idea to work, only to fail to achieve what seems like a simple idea.
Perhaps after reading hour 7, when data types are introduced and the idea of creating your own is mentioned, might the reader flick back and start to consider the implication of the code read much earlier.
Overall, a good attempt to cover most core topics in C++ in a hurry (24 hours is rushing it a bit whatever was written, if you ask me!), but I'm not sure it should be a first C++ book, and I could not recommend it as a book for someone with no previous programming knowledge..
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Summary: Look elsewhere for C++ instruction
Review: I'm halfway through this book and am having serious doubts about the quality of its instruction. First of all, I am a professional programmer (C, PHP, PERL, Shell, some Java) and have a degree in technical writing, so I feel qualified to make some observations here. First of all, the author breaks several rules of good technical writing, including using future tense, subjunctive mood, indefinite pronouns, and passive voice. Second, the author's writing style is supposed to be conversational, but comes off as indirect and disorganized. Third, the examples are poor, being completely inpractical, yet also verbose. (It's very difficult to follow a "simple" program across 4 or 5 pages.) The "analysis" section breaks the author's own rule by attempting to tell what a line of code does, rather than why. The author also frequently drops in statements that have not been explained yet, then passes over them in the analysis. Fourth, there are frequent typos in this book. Often the typos are merely extra spaces (for example between two words in a variable name, like my Age, which makes me think of Perl 5's keyword "my" for modifying scope) but this is enough to confuse both the reader and a compiler. Perhaps these errors were introduced by the publishing application, but they clearly should have been caught by an editor. Finally, there are no exercises in this book! The first rule of teaching a programming course (which I've done) is that people only retain information through practice. Where is the practice in this book???
Rating: 
Summary: Got me started
Review: I'm not a software type although I do have some background in programming. I wanted to learn C++ to build my own applications for my computer, but I wanted the learning curve to be reasonable so that I can do it on my spare time. I also wanted to learn programming C++ using my Visual C++ compiler. I purchased this book and Deitel's book "Introduction to MFC" which gets into using Microsoft Foundation Class. You can purchase both books from Amazon for under $45. The two books complemented each other perfectly, and in about 8 weeks spending about an hour each day, I can program applications using my compiler. These two books were perfect for a novice like myself. What was nice was that both books came with a working compiler and all the examples were available either as a download or was available on the CD-ROM. The book seems to give me all the command reference for ANSI and ISO C++ compiler which is a big plus if you also program for UNIX/LINUX systems. What these books doesn't do is that it won't teach you the more sophisticated operating system related things like how to access a disk or other I/Os. If you are trying to learn this level of programming, you need to move up to a higher level books such as the "Win32 System Programming: A Windows(R) 2000 Application Developer's Guide (2nd Edition)" by Johnson M. Hart. But to get started on C++ programming, after many false starts over the years, these two books did it for me.
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