Sams Teach Yourself C++ in One Hour a Day (6th Edition) (Sams Teach Yourself) | 
 enlarge | Authors: Jesse Liberty, Siddhartha Rao, Bradley L. Jones
Publisher: Sams
Category: Book
List Price: $44.99
Buy New: $25.00
You Save: $19.99 (44%)
New (27) Used (8) from $25.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 61799
Media: Paperback
Edition: 6
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 888
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3
Dimensions (in): 9 x 7 x 1.9
ISBN: 0672329417
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.133
EAN: 9780672329418
ASIN: 0672329417
Publication Date: July 18, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: new
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Product Description
Sams Teach Yourself C++ in One Hour a Day Jesse Liberty Siddhartha Rao Bradley Jones The Sixth Edition of Sams Teach Yourself C++ in 21 Days More than 250,000 sold! In just one hour a day, you’ll have all the skills you need to begin programming in C++. With this complete tutorial, you’ll quickly master the basics and then move on to more advanced features and concepts: - Master the fundamentals of C++ and object-oriented programming
- Learn some of the more advanced features of C++
- Learn the Standard Template Library and the containers and algorithms used in most real-world C++ applications
- Learn how to build effective programs in C++ with hands-on exercises
- Get expert tips on implementing C++ in the corporate environment
Learn on your own time, at your own pace - No previous programming experience required
- Learn C++ and object-oriented design, programming, and analysis
- Write fast and powerful C++ programs, compile the source code, and create executable files
- Understand the latest ANSI standard
- Use the Standard Template Library’s algorithms and containers to write feature-rich yet stable C++ applications
- Develop sophisticated programming techniques with functions, arrays, variables, and smart pointers
- Learn to expand your program’s power with inheritance and polymorphism
- Master the features of C++ by learning from programming experts
- Works with all ANSI C++ compilers
Jesse Liberty is the author of numerous books on software development, including best-selling titles on C++ and .NET. He is the president of Liberty Associates, Inc., where he provides custom programming, consulting, and training. Siddhartha Rao, Microsoft MVP for Visual C++, has experience in programming driver and application software using C++. He is an expert in the Windows programming arena and works for a German software giant. He also moderates CodeGuru.com, a vibrant online programming community. Bradley Jones, Microsoft MVP for Visual C++, runs a number of software development sites including Developer.com, CodeGuru.com, DevX, VBForums, Gamelan, and other JupiterWeb-owned sites. Category: Programming Covers: C++ User Level: Beginning–Intermediate Register your book at informit.com/register for access to source code, example files, updates, and corrections as they become available.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Not perfect, but well worth the price September 5, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I'm not a big fan of "Teach yourself X in Y amount of time" books. There, I've said it. Most of these books have their timing wrong anyway, you can't learn to be a world class polo player in 24 hours, you can't build your own ocean liner in 21 days and you can't be a professional hula champion in six easy lessons. And you won't be able to teach yourself C++, at least not enough to be of any use, in an hour a day.
But this book works. Forgetting the one hour a day promise, the book works very well. Learning C++, or just C, or any programming language from scratch is hard. Even harder if you have to learn the concepts of programming, loops, branches, pre and post tests and the whole object oriented thing. This book doesn't make it simple, but it does make the process more logical. And it breaks the process into small steps, most easily learned in an hour.
I'm not a C++ guru. I've used Visual Basic for just about ever and only written a few minor projects in C. I can print my name to the screen in C++, but that's about it. Or at least it was until I started this book. Walking through the first section, aptly titled "The Basics," I was able to get moderately familiar with C++ in such a way that I'll retain the knowledge pretty well. Quite obviously I'll get rusty if I don't use the new skills on a routine basis, but learning them was straight forward and well presented. The tutorials are backed by example code that worked fine in several different compilers and the analysis of what the code is doing is very effective at teaching the concepts as well as the specifics.
I do have a few minor complaints about the book. For one, it almost seems like two books. The first two thirds teaches C++ fundamentals and Object Oriented Programming quite effectively. But then the book almost changes direction and dives into the Standard Template Library. To me it's almost as if the book went a few hundred pages long. I suppose with the trend to produce forest-leveling technical books rather than specific shorter, more to the topic books, that this is to be expected. But I'd rather pay $50 for a 120 page book with only the information I needed than $20 for a thousand page book that scattered that same 120 pages across hundreds of pages of irrelevant, at least to me, material.
On the plus side, this book's 800 or so pages aren't padded with repetitive material or fluff just to meet a page count. The contents may not all be relevant to me, but they are likely relevant to someone else who might buy the book. I tend to see quizzes and exercises in a book like this as extra paper I didn't need, but a student with this book as a course text would find the material appropriate. Even for me the exercises provoked a thinking process not contained in the lesson itself. And in the end, you can't truly learn anything, whether it takes an hour a day or ten, unless you use the knowledge outside of the written example. If you want to learn C++, at your own pace, this is an excellent book to have.
 So far very good! August 13, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I just finished chapter 4 managing arrays and strings. The book is well written the examples are error free and best of all the book follows a great structure that's something like;
-lesson,
-example code,
-analysis of code,
-at the end of each chapter there's a summary,
-Q/A for the main points of the chapter.
-workshop section with quiz questions and exercises.
The exercises send you out to write your own code from scratch and think outside of the books examples, some of the exercises are labeled BUG BUSTERS which show code snippets with errors for you to solve. Appendix D has quiz answers and possible solutions to the exercises.
So all that gets your mind into the language not just memorizing it, and gives you multiple opportunities to understand each point.
The book includes a free 45day pass to read the book online via "Safari online".
I highly recommend this book!
easy lessons July 26, 2008
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
I never read the 5th edition of this book, so I can't really remark on the differences with this 6th edition. But considering just this edition...
The book fits well into the style of the series of "Teach Yourself ... in One Hour a Day". Each chapter, which the authors term a lesson, is bite-sized. I can readily envisage a typical neophyte to programming (of any language) being able to assimilate its contents in roughly an hour. Keep in mind that if you have never encountered this series before, then don't take too literally the one hour limit, as far as understanding the text in each chapter. Some chapters will naturally be more important and cover more complex concepts than others. If you need extra time, take it. The shoehorning into an hour is only an approximation.
What might be the simpler chapters? One could be that on controlling program flow, using while, do-while and for loops. The most important item in this chapter is that you should use these constructs whenever possible, in place of goto. Yes, you can use goto in C++. But the book warns that this leads to spaghetti code. Tangled and difficult to debug and extend. Goto is a tempting shortcut to beginners that must be resisted.
A more complicated chapter is on pointers. Describing the some of the myriad ways that they can be used and misused. There is ample warning about pointer errors. The book does not do a comparative analysis with other languages. But you should know that the designers of Java thought pointer bugs in C/C++ were so numerous and miserable that pointer arithmetic has been essentially banned in Java. Yeah, you want to be a C++ programmer; why else would you be considering this book? That's fair enough. But it doesn't hurt to know some of the key differences between C++ and its major alternative, which seems to be Java. If nothing else, this particular difference can keep you focused on very carefully writing pointer code.
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