C

The C++ Programming Language (Special 3rd Edition)

Format: Hardcover
Author: Bjarne Stroustrup
ReleaseDate: 15 February, 2000
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Rating:

The perfect answer
You can certainly count on him to deliver what so many people want: the brain dump of the creator. Stroustup created C++, the first of the commercial OO languages, and shepherded it through many incarnations. In this, the book succeeds admirably.

I find many problems in using this book, however. Every fact about the language, at the level of the most advanced user, is spelled out here. It's just the organization of them that causes me problems - more a stream-of-consciousness style than either a reference or a tutorial. When organization doesn't work for me, I throw myself on the mercies of the index, hoping that associative lookup will succeed where linear narration failed. I found myself boggled there, too, caught between too many irrelevancies and too few high-grade hits, and trying to figure out what page the current indent level started on. An index is an associative structure, a little like a psychologist's word association test. If this is the outcome of some test, my diagnosis is "extra-terrestrial. "

So, standing here, I'm caught between two poles. It's not a tutorial or handbook, like Deitel, but not a fully rigorous and impenetrable standard, like the ISO spec. Maybe it's the perfect answer. My only regret is that I never heard the question.

//wiredweird.

must have c++ developer book

But for advanced programmers for c++ this is must-have book. This book is not very simple, so I don't recomend it to the beginners.

Best C++ Reference
I'm glad that this edition is hard-backed so I won't wear it out. I used the first edition of Stroustrip's The C++ Programming Language until it was dog-eared and the binding fell apart. C++ is a complex language and it's impossible to write a program of any size in C++ without a good reference on your desk. I have not found any other C++ reference that is as complete or as useful as this book.

This is not an introduction to C++ but rather a reference book. I learned C++ from Lippman's C++ Primer but that's on my bookshelf and Stroustrip is on my desk. .