This book is upside-down from almost every other programming reference book I've ever read. Usually books like to start you at the ground level: if it's a book on C++, you get memory management and pointers; if it's on basic coding, you get sorting algorithms and linked lists. If it's on generics, you generally get implementations of iterators.

What this sort of book never points out is, you shouldn't ever need any of that nonsense. C# and Java have a zillion standard library collection classes that implement iterators. Every halfway modern language has a linked list class. And in C++, you hardly have any need to do any memory management - if you use the standard template library.

This is where Stroustrup is coming from. He starts you at the very beginning, learning how to use the std::list class just like you would do if you were using it, intelligently, in an actual application. That's more or less how the whole book is organized: practical, sensible applications of standard templates. Not implementations of iterators (although that's in here), not memory management; just writing code in the way Stroustrup envisioned code being written when he designed the language.

So, if you want to write code the way Bjarne thinks you should write code, read this book. ( )

This book is not for people recently coming from C. It's for those who fond of C++ for a long time, and really experienced programmers in general.

Some parts look so incredibly cryptic to me that i always take a sip on this beast whenever i feel like learning something in CS. And yeah, it's not only about C++, it's about Computer Science and Object-Oriented Programming. ( )

Excellent book.

Great C++ programming book. I read it through first and now use it for reference and the clear writing style and organisation make it an excellent book for both of these uses. ( )

When I read this book nowadays, I always think in the background that the author and his cohorts must be crazy to actually think imposing this kind of complexity on a programmer is a good idea. If you think C++ might be your ideal language, use this book as a curative -- beat yourself over the head or read it; the effect is the same.

On the other hand, if you must program C++, this is the only source I would trust for complete, accurate information, in tandem with the GNU libstdc++ sources. ( )