The C++ Programming Language
Bjarne Stroustrup (1997)

Book review by Ted Felix

Written by the creator of the language. This book's tutorial format is probably best suited to expert programmers who already know another language and want to learn C++ quickly. It's interesting that the sheer size of the C++ language renders a tutorial format book useless as a reference, yet a smaller language like C yields a wonderful tutorial (Kernighan and Ritchie 1988) that is also a perfect reference.

For beginners, I recommend avoiding this book in favor of some of the others that are available. Intermediate C++ programmers will find it a very educational read, but will quickly outgrow its usefulness. Being a tutorial, advanced C++ programmers will find it difficult to use as a reference and a bit controversial. In Chapter 8, his discussion of namespaces is curious at best, and misleading at worst. namespaces are best used to partition modules to avoid naming clashes like the namespace "std" is used in the Standard C++ Library. This book seems out of touch with how C++ is used in the real world. A better reference is www.cppreference.com.

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend anything better for beginners as I'm not very experienced with introductory C++ texts. I think I may have used Stan Lippman's C++ Primer (4th Edition) (in its fourth edition as of 2/2005) when I learned C++ in 1991 (at least there's a copy of the second edition laying around in my basement). I've heard good things about Deitel and Deitel's C++ How to Program (5th Edition) (How to Program) (in its 5th edition as of 1/2005).

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