As C++ books go, this book contains surprisingly little, in fact, for the C++ part, you can probably do over about 3 hours.

This book has one of the most misleading titles I've come across as the book is really a manual for the Visual xxx.NET IDE and MFC. With this in mind, I've decided to review the book as a manual.

As manuals go, this is rather good. Not brilliant (it tries to cram too much in at the expense of accuracy and detail), but rather good. The parts of the MFC touched upon are well written and well documented, but there are not enough of them or of sufficient complexity to be of much use.

For once though, the time frame for teaching yourself the ins and outs of an IDE are not too far off the mark - this is a significant improvement over the other Sams teach yourself books.

If your copy of the MS Visual C++.NET manual has gone missing, this will fill the place it occupied and possibly do a better job. For the rest of us, it's of little use.