Rating: 
Summary: Great book to learn C++!
Review: This book is an excellent book for those wishing to learn C++. It is very well written, with good examples.This is a great book for those wishing to learn C++ without any prior programming experience, and those with some experience in another language. I would even suggest this as a text for a first semester college level, "Introduction to C++," course. It even covers enough to be used for the first part of a second semester course, with coverage of overloading of operators for classes, templates, and modular programming (projects, and makefiles). This book is short enough too that you can actually start learning quickly. Those "Learn C++ in 21 Days" books must expect people to be able to read those books all day long for 21 days, and maintain no employment, or else forget about any kind of social or family life afterwork. It is not a book for those that already know C++, as it says on the back cover. So keep that in mind as you read the other reviews here that rate it low -- perhaps they should have read the back cover before buying it.
Rating: 
Summary: practical c++ programming
Review: When you pick this book up, your not only picking up a book that teaches C++, you are picking up an incredible amount of insight into the programming discipline. This is about the 5th book I've tackled on C++ and it is the only book I have found to be 100% useful and relevant to my needs. I disagree with some of the reviewers here that say the book is *ONLY* for beginners and of little use beyond that. Come on! If you want to write more advanced code, then start with the basics here and work up on your own (or cut-and-paste from the CD on an 'advanced' book if you're lazy). Many things in this book have added a fresh perspective to my approach to programming, especially to optimization, debugging and portability. The book does teach C++ for beginners, but goes far beyond many of the "Beginning" books out there, of which I have read my share. In short, you are getting more than a comprehensive book on C++ here. You are also getting a good book on the practice of programming itself.
Rating: 
Summary: I'd give it 0 stars if that were an option!
Review: Where do I start? OK C book. Terrible C++ book. The author's _Practical C Programming_ is OK. As some other reviewer said, it looks like he took the code examples from that book, changed "printf" to "cout", added a few pages on classes, and sent off the manuscript. Many reviewers here have argued that this is supposed to be an introduction to C++, not an exhaustive tutorial, and so it's OK that the book doesn't cover many advanced topics. I strenuously disagree. As Allen Holub has pointed out, C++ is so full of traps and pitfalls that there's no point in using it unless you are going to make full use of its advanced features. The advanced features *are* the core of the language. So any introduction to C++ must get into inheritance, virtual functions, templates, operator overloading, and the STL as soon as possible. But not only does this book not deal with the features of the language that it should, but the material it *does* deal with is presented in an inexcusably poor way. It's clear that Oualline really doesn't know C++, or he would use inheritance correctly---hell, he would declare main() correctly! Summary: If you try to pick up C++ from this book, you'll do your understanding of the language permanent damage. Far and away the best beginner's book on C++ is Stephen Prata's _C++ Primer Plus_. (Not the similarly titled Stanley Lippman book, which I think is vastly overrated.) O'Reilly should be ashamed to have published _Practical C++ Programming_---it is *not* up to their standard.
| 
