Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++ (Developer's Library) [ペーパーバック]

For some reasons, I had expected a book on reflections on Stroustrup's philosophy of C++ programming aimed at experienced practitioners. I was quite surprised by the heft of the book, but much more so by the content. It's a book for non-programmers or beginners to teach them how to program with C++ as the vehicle and it's structured for use as a textbook for a first year college course.

Physically, the book is massive, weighing in at over 1200 pages. It is printed on good quality semi-glossy paper and the extensive use of color will remind some of the Deitel & Deitel series, at least superficially.

The prospective student will probably benefit from a comparison of this book to the existing leading tutorial books. The leaders, by popularity or quality, are (in no specific order): Lippman, Lajoie, & Moo's C++ Primer (4th Edition), Eckel's Thinking in C++: Introduction to Standard C++, Volume One (2nd Edition) (Vol 1) and Thinking in C++, Volume 2: Practical Programming, Dietel & Deitel's C++ How to Program (6th Edition), Koenig & Moo's Accelerated C++: Practical Programming by Example (C++ In-Depth Series), Lippman's Essential C++ (C++ In-Depth Series), and Prata's C++ Primer Plus (5th Edition). These all share the common purpose of teaching the C++ language, so an effort is made to cover the features and concepts, with examples that were constructed to illustrate them. This is NOT Stroustrup's approach.

Stroustrup isn't trying to teach the C++ language. He's teaching how to program. C++ is the tool he uses to do so. This isn't a subtle difference. It's the difference between teaching you about a wrench and making up fake car parts to fix with the wrench and teaching you auto repair and giving you a wrench to do so. You still learn the tool as you go along, but it's a side effect.

The overall direction of the book is to teach students how to program solutions to real problems in a way that one would in the real world. Things that other books consider "extraneous to illustrating the principle" aren't swept under the carpet. Inputs are validated. Code is tested. Errors are detected. Exceptions are thrown and caught. They're not incidental details, they're part of the solution, and that's how Stroustrup presents them. Yet, these "details" don't detract from the readability or understandability of the code. In fact, they preempt the stream of "but what about..." questions that students will inevitable have when presented incomplete toy code.

Chapters 6 and 7 are gems. They develop an expression evaluator, walking the student through a tokenizer, parser, and interpreter without bogging the student down with deep theory that will be learned in later courses and is unnecessary to get started (though many will be inspired to go read up on it). Besides showing some interesting and useful techniques, understanding an expression evaluator goes a long way toward understanding programming languages in general.

The discussion on containers and iterators explains how one would go about designing them, not just using them. Once the development of a vector-like container is described, the other standard containers are presented for the student to use. No time is wasted trying to teach data structures, for which other classes and books already exist. The same applies to sorts and other basic algorithms. The standard ones are presented for immediate use by the student.

There are chapters on basic I/O, GUI and graphics (using FLTK), data formatting, and numerical programming (this is my least favorite). There is also some cursory coverage of upcoming C++ features as they are found in boost, such as regular expressions. Because this book deliberately targets beginners, you won't find advanced topics like template metaprogramming. There are entire books (three of them!) dedicated to that.

Finally, there is some brief discussion of the history of C++, on its own and in the context of the evolution of programming languages in general. I would have enjoyed more of this.

If I were to teach a course, this book would be my first choice. A disciplined self-learner would also be well served by this book.

However, it does not try to target those who already know how to program and wish to migrate to C++, though they would doubtless find this book interesting and well written. For them, I would recommend "Accelerated C++" or "Essential C++" to bring them up to speed quickly or ""C++ Primer" to study the language more in depth. For those coming from a language that is conceptually different from C++, the two "Thinking in C++" volumes do a good job of aiding in the paradigm shift. I am deliberately omitting non-tutorial books like the "Effective C++" and "Exceptional C++" series, though they are certainly essential.

Everyone -- beginner and migrating expert -- should avoid C++ How to Program (6th Edition). Notwithstanding the pretty presentation, this book teaches abysmal programming practices, such as blatant and amateurish violations of the Liskov Substitutability Principle.

Naturally, every C++ programmer should own The C++ Programming Language: Special Edition (3rd Edition) and C++ in a Nutshell is a marvelous one-stop reference.

As a side note, there is a long running debate over which language is most suitable for teaching an introduction to programming. C++ is usually one of the first to be eliminated. This book puts C++ back in the running and and shows that it's more about the teacher than it is about the language.

I had just finished reading Herbert Schildt's book C++: The Complete Reference and had resolved not to read another door stop before devoting much more time to practising the new techniques I had learned. Then I got wind of Bjarne Stroustrup's new book for beginners: Programming Principles and Practice Using C++. Now Dr Stroustrup occupies a very elevated position in the panoply of C++ deities; his words are cast in stone and he is often referred to as "the creator" of C++ (read: he invented it). Most programming tutorials have shortcomings of one kind or another, so I was intrigued to discover what sort of a job BS had done. I was not disappointed.

Firstly, his approach is not to treat learning C++ as a purely language-technical issue, but to talk about programming as a means to the solving of problems, and use C++ (the most versatile and widely used programming language we have) as a vehicle to do this.

After a dedication to Lawrence Petersen, his collaborator on this project, there is an interesting chapter concerning the place of computer systems in modern life.

Programming is introduced in the conventional way with the simplest concepts, then the learning curve becomes progressively steeper (a feature which is required of a reasonably complete introduction to the subject, even given the 1264 pages of this book).

BS uses several techniques that I had not seen before. All the code is printed in a bold typeface in blue. That makes it easier to distinguish code terms from other, possibly similar words within the body text. He does not use unnecessary spaces in his code. This helps to clarify where spaces are actually required by the syntax as opposed to merely beautifying the code. It also allows more characters per line, but the downside is that the code tends to look more crowded.

Nearly every chapter ends with a set of drills (short exercises), a review of all the new material introduced in the chapter, a list of the new terms, a very comprehensive and well thought out set of more substantial exercises and a postscript giving final thoughts. If students were to take on these exercises in a conscientious way I have no doubt that the learning curve would be flattened to a great extent and they would rapidly gain proficiency in programming.

Having prepared the ground thoroughly, BS raises the level of activity by introducing programming techniques which produce graphical output, and devotes 160 pages in five chapters to it. An independently produced lightweight graphical user interface package called FLTK has to be downloaded and installed for this purpose (its free of charge). FLTK was chosen partly because it is a cross-platform system (cross platform functionality being one of BS's hobby horses, although one which is justified). I found this part of the book a bit tedious, mainly because I am not greatly interested in graphics at present and partly because I did not have the time to play with the system sufficiently.

Two thirds of the way through the book is a refreshing and fascinating chapter dealing with the history of programming and some of the personalities involved; something I had not thought of investigating in any detail before. Colour photographs are another feature of this book which adds to its appeal.

An important theme of the book is the idea that its all too easy to make mistakes when programming, but there are ways to mitigate this. BS owns up and highlights many mistakes he made (some of them deliberate, for pedagogical reasons) when writing programs for the book. I find that both endearing and encouraging. Major sections deal with debugging and system testing, including the recording of run-time.

The last chapter is an introduction to the C programming language. I was very pleased to see that since you cannot go very far in the world of C++ without tripping over branches of C code, and it helps a lot if you can understand it. There are five appendices which provide useful reference material and some extra ideas for anyone who has stayed the course.

The book is supported by some excellent web pages with supporting material including an errata list and well designed tutorial materials for teachers.

I found this book generally very revealing and rate it not only excellent, but inspiring. It provides the means to become a good programmer if you are prepared to do the work, and the encouragement to do so.

I agree with Hubert above. This book is great for the "advanced beginner". I too have been through several of the shorter, more to the point, "teach yourself C++"-style books. I am glad that I did those first. I am totally self-taught and unfortunately have no mentor to ask anything. This is the first book that has spent any time on data validation and parsing and has introduced catching errors as part of the bigger picture rather that a discrete subject. This is the way it should be be done.

Chapters 6 introduces parsing. This has been the missing link for me. As soon as you start writing anything beyond the simplest of programs you run into the problem of needing to validate and make sense of user input. You always just knew that there had to be a "standard" way of doing this because the problem is so fundamental, however, the answer is not obvious. I developed a far simpler "home-grown" parser for an ip address calculator program I wrote but using token objects is FAR superior. (which makes me wonder about how many other things I know nothing about) It is not simple and I spent a lot of time reading and trying to truly internalize the chapter and doing the exercises. However, I do wish that more of the answers were published on his site for those of us working at home alone without the benefit of a professor.

Also, graphics and GUIs are given some coverage. This is also unusual for a beginner book. None of the others that I have does this. I think it is important to show that C++ is graphics friendly early on otherwise the ignorant get the impression that only newer languages like VB can handle such things.

So, basically I see this book as a cornerstone in your self-education. It you are working alone it is going to take some time and effort to plow through this monster. (Especially if you do the in-chapter exercises and problems.) But it is a very good book and will likely serve as a nice gateway to more advanced books on the subject.