I am not going to say very much about this book because it is not easily available in the UK and is very expensive for a student text. I only came across it because I was looking at the home page of one of the authors. The title stood out because I had done the technical review for a book with the same title for Wiley&Sons.

Though aimed at the same readership (University Computer Science Students) this book is strongly focused on programming in C++. Though the copyright date is 1996 I would guess that it was based on material that had been developed over the first few years of this decade. It is a well-written and thoughtful presentation of C++ as covered by the 1991 edition of 'The C++ Programming Language'. Unfortunately that makes it heavily dated. The next generation of Computer Science students need a radically up-dated approach commensurate with the '97 edition of 'The C++ Programming Language'. Sadly that will require a major rewrite and re-organisation of the material.

When I was browsing through the text I came to Appendix A that lists the precedence rules for operators. The authors claim that these were adapted from the list given by Bjarne Stroustrup in the 1994 printing of The C++ Programming Language . I do not have a copy of that printing but I am sure that it included such things as the scope operator and the comma operator but there is no sight of these in this listing. That investigation led me to another problem that I had missed, the precedence of operators seems to have been changed over the last seven years. That I must investigate further.

If the authors can be persuaded to invest the time needed to do a complete revision, their publishers should be supportive because these authors understand what they are doing unlike some of the others whose work is being published by McGraw-Hill.