Harvey M. Deitel

A decent programming book, D&D's How to Program C++ hits all the basic points of C++ and a good deal of programming in general. Where this book excels is its inclusion of basic UML and object oriented design concepts right from the beginning, instead of being a separate topic covered in another context. Where this book fails is in its in depth C++ content.

Keep in mind that I learned C++ from Stroustup's C++ Programming Language, so the bar has been set quite high.

This is an excellent introduction to programming book. In undergraduate, I was an astrophysics major who needed to write computer programs as part of my work on a NASA student project. I used this book to teach myself computer programming. Later, while teaching introduction to computer programming as a graduate student in computer sciences, I drew examples from this text to supplement my instruction. (Graduate students who taught classes were told which textbook to use, but I considered the show more one we were using to be overly simplistic because it delayed teaching objects). This is a great book for teaching object oriented programming languages such as Java. show less

Dietel & Dietel are, hands-down, among the best writers for the technical professions. In addition to the nuts-and-bolts information, they also present real-world code applications, showing how built-in functions and subroutines can be properly utilized in real programming.

I used this in a course I took and found it to be useful. It seemed understandable to me, a seasoned programmer in general but a novice in java, yet it was also accessible to others in class who were much newer to the whole process. It is arranged in easy to follow steps, each lesson building on the previous. It is well indexed.