Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!ncar!gatech!mcnc!decvax!decwrl!pyramid!hplabs!hp-pcd!hplsla!jima
From: jima@hplsla.HP.COM (              Jim Adcock)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: Readable C++ book
Message-ID: <6590028@hplsla.HP.COM>
Date: 7 Apr 88 17:37:44 GMT
References: <804@imsvax.UUCP>
Organization: HP Lake Stevens, WA
Lines: 80

| |    But seriously, here is an alternative that should be available shortly
| |(or so Addison-Wesley keeps telling me :-):
| |
| |
| |           An Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming and C++
| 
| Today (Mar28) I called Addison-Wesley, and they claimed the book is available
| now and accepted my [credit card] order for it -- $27.95 [+ taxes + postage]
| 
| I'll report back on the book after I actually receive it. [Until then,
| Caveat Emptor :-)]

I just received the above book, which took about 1.5 weeks to arrive [by mail] 
after my order, and did a quick initial scan of it last night.

So with the caveat that what follows are my, [and mine only,]
very initial impressions:

+ Overall, I think this is book worth having, if only because the Stroustrup is
  the only other C++ book available.

+ This book assumes the reader has K&R as a background and spends very little 
  time going over features K&R C and C++ have in common.

+ This should be a good book for the reader with extensive background in C,
  but with little or no background in C++ nor "object oriented programming."

+ The book spends a fair amount of its time on some medium complexity program
  examples, which I feel represent about a medium quality programming effort.

+ The book does spend most of its time addressing the "object oriented" aspects
  of C++.

+ The author appears to take an approach influenced somewhat by Modula 
  [there are some comparisons to Modula in the text].  Fortunately, this
  author does not take an approach where he tries to re-implement Smalltalk
  in C++.

- The few illustrations are not "worth a thousand words", maybe twelve words.

- The book follows the unfortunate trend of many computer language books of 
  printing the program listings in an ugly and difficult to read font --
  in order to distinguish the program listings from the body of the text.

+ This author uses the style of balanced braces rather than dangling braces. 

+ This author DOES NOT make use of non-syntactic #defines.

- The book doesn't contain info on the latest 2.0 goodies.  I'd guess the book
  corresponds to about AT&T version 1.2.

- This book follows the historical assumption that the AT&T "translator" IS C++.
  That is to say, it didn't anticipate that C++ compilers are becoming
  available from independent sources.  This doesn't affect the meat of the book,
  which doesn't seem to spend any significant amount of time covering what it 
  takes to compile C++ on any given machine, but is a problem that only shows up
  in some of the book's ancillary comments.

+ The book seems to contain enough detail to probably get the average C user up 
  and running, writing casual C++ programs in an "object oriented" style.

- The book probably does not get into enough details of the hairy issues with
  C++ and object oriented approaches in general to satisfy the needs of 
  professional programmers attempting to write large commercial products in C++.
  Issues like garbage collection and memory management, storing and restoring
  objects to disc, error recovery, exceptions, multiple inheritence, efficiency
  details, etc .....
 
- This book does not have any examples related to graphical windowing systems.
  Given that standards are just emerging in this area, I guess I shouldn't be
  surprised.  But I feel that a majority of "object oriented" programming
  efforts ARE going to be directed at graphical windowing systems, such as 
  X Windows.  So its hard for me to see how you can seriously write about
  "object oriented" programming without addressing graphical windowing systems.

+ This book does not appear to contain the flagrant typos, typesetting
  errors, obvious inaccuracies, etc. that are found in some low quality computer
  texts I'm sure we've all run across.

Finally, I must re-emphasize that these are my opinions alone and represent
only a half dozen hours worth of scanning and reading the book.