Big C++

Rating:
Summary: javaboy
Review: Lots of examples, very easy to follow along. A big downside that I noticed is that there is no website for the book to find the necessary libraries for the examples. I now found that I can find them on the site of the previous book the author wrote. After wich I had to find more libraries wich were either missing or incomplete. This come down to skipping chapter 3 and subsequent programming exercises that require the knowledge gained from chapte 3. Very frustrading, but I hope that that the author will create the site soon, making this a 5/5 book. Great otherwise.

Rating:
Summary: Modern treatment of C++
Review: This is an excellent textbook written by knowledgeable authors. Horstmann teaches at San Jose State University in California. He has in-depth knowledge of C++, having written the Safe STL library. He also writes for the Sun Core Java series of books.
Although the book is large, it can be used for a 2 or 3 semester sequence of courses in software development using C++. After covering fundamentals, the authors cover advanced topics with modern relevance. Chapter 13 on Object-Oriented Design discusses the software development life cycle, Class-Responsibility-Collaboration using CRC cards, and gives practical tips for implementing class associations. Other advanced topics include templates (similar to generics), the C++ Standard Template Library, design patterns, GUI's, Relational Databases (using MySQL), and XML. Appendices cover C++ Language Coding Guidelines, and legacy C/C++ topics.

The authors' writing style is very clear and easy for college freshmen to understand. The Random Facts sections help make the textbook interesting, and cover topics such as: Computing History, the First Bug, the Therac-25 bug (an ethical issue), the Ariane Rocket incident, etc.

Sample code can be found at the author's website at:
http://www.horstmann.com/bigcpp.html
and also at the Wiley publisher higher education website:
http://he-cda.wiley.com/WileyCDA/ (search by author for Horstmann). The book is well organized with a good set of end-of-chapter exercises, programming problems, and references for further reading.

We have adopted this textbook for a 2-sequence course in object-oriented software development. I highly recommend it.