The author of this book is rapidly creating an image in my mind of a poor man's Herbert Schildt. The index (well there is one, which puts him ahead of HS whose pocket reference doesn't) is packed with references such as eToday . In other words most of the index references function and variable names found in example code. I tried looking up things that might baffle those with enough knowledge of C++ to use a reference book. I looked up

explicit

and

mutable

but the author apparently does not know of them. I looked

namespace

and found the author's example declared an

enum  bool

. Yes, he knows

bool

is a keyword but you will have to look elsewhere for that. I tried looking for a list of keywords (quite important if you are to ensure that you do not accidentally use one (like

and

) that your compiler does not yet know of) but I could not find one.

You would have to be a real dummy to use this book as a reference. Well perhaps that is a little harsh because some of the author's explanations are quite respectable, but I need more from a reference book.