At first sight this book did not appear so bad: while leafing through it I noticed that the author had successfully avoided the most common errors of the worst books (e.g,

void main()

I was wrong. While reading the book I found too many fundamental errors that, in my opinion, are truly harmful, will impair the reader's understanding of C++ and will prevent her from correctly programming in C++. So I stopped reading just before the final chapters on STL and streams. Even if they are perfect, they will hardly do any good. You are better off reading a good book cover to cover.

I believe I owe both the author of the book and the readers of this review an explanation about the distinctions I make between apparently mild errors (that are not always mild) and truly harmful errors. Here are a few comments/errors that would not justify putting this book on the 'not recommended' list:

1. The book title implies that it aims at readers who already know how to program, so why does it have a section (1.3) that explains binary and hexadecimal representation? Moreover, in my opinion, this section is both incomprehensible and confusing to anyone who is not familiar with programming.
2. When explaining iteration statements (2.5) the author really misses the opportunity to explain the differences between a for-loop and a while-loop (in fact, only the syntactical differences are mentioned, together with the immediate semantics).
3. The author claims that all assignment operators must be member functions (e.g, +=, p. 180). This is not true (cf. B.Stroustrup 3rd, 11.2.2).

However, the following problems are too important to ignore and, in my view, warrant 'awarding' this book the infamous 'not recommended' mark:

1. Testing successful input should be taught right at the beginning, but in this book it appears in chapter-10 (the last one - chapter 11 is a kind of appendix). Here is a while header from the book (p. 51):

   while (cin>> i, i> 0)

   Apparently, this example is used to explain the usage of the comma operator. Alas, the alternative code
   

   while (cin>> i&& i> 0)

   
   is so much superior to the original, that I consider this example to be deceptive for innocent readers.
2. From page 121 (top), explaining arrays as function-parameters: 'Note that the array length is omitted in

   a[];

   if we had written it, then it would necessarily have been a constant, which would have made the function less general and elegant.' The above statement is poppycock. Do not take my word for it - just read a decent book about C. [Well, Ammeraal is wrong, but this is also a book about C++, so appeals to books on C are inappropriate. FG]
3. It seems that the author does not have even a clue about

   static_cast

   and

   reinterpret_cast

   . This is illustrated in various places in the book and I have chosen one such example (p. 205, bottom): If B is a base class from which D is derived, ... implicit conversion from D* to B* is possible, while a

   reinterpret_cast

   is required for the conversion from B* to D*. Almost every non-toy C++ program will crash if the above advice is followed.

reinterpret_cast

dynamic_cast