The C++ Programming Language: Special Edition (3rd Edition)

A working C++ programmer needs many books, there is no "one size fits all". This is one of the many books you will need. It is not a beginners guide to programming. It is not a "touchy-feely" tutorial with pretty pictures. It is a precise description of the C++ language. Precise descriptions leave no room for ambiguity and so by neccessity it is verbose and highly technical. People who complain about this book are missing the point. It is a reference for those who care about the precise definition of language features. It is not Stroustrup's job to select the most "interesting" subset of the langauge, it is his job to explain the entire language and all it's subtleties. If he decides to spend 20 pages describing some little used feature then so be it, the information is there for a reason, and someone will find it useful.

The bottom line is this - if you are a professional C++ programmer you will need this book (but you knew that anyway). If you are a hobbyist or keen amateur you should get this book after you have reached a certain level of proficiency where you are asking questions that simple tutorials cannot answer. The answers are in this book.

P.S. Bjarne Stroustrup has a FAQ for this book at his homepage at http://www.research.att.com/~bs/3rd.html which will help you decide if you want this book.

A friend gave me this book. I have used it only in times where I already had done what I wanted to do, I just could't remember exactly how to do it. Implication: this is a horrible book from which to learn. If you don't know how to do something in C++, you won't learn it here. However; if you want to remember something, the detail in this book makes it an indespensible reference.

More positively, this book covers everything I have ever eneded to know, and I imagine it covers everything there is to know about C++. I think anyone who writes in C++ needs this on the shelf; for Christ's sake, Stroustrup wrote the freakin language!

Bottom line: Learn it first, buy this book for reference later.

Finally a book for the rest of us.

A programmer

my suggestion is, before reading this book, you not only need to have a lot of programming experience, but you'd better have knowledge about the theories of programming language and compiler too. I've seen people who already know C and Java and have read tens of thousands lines of code being frequently frustrated when reading this book just because the lack of the aforementioned skills. spending a whole night just to understand 3 pages is not uncommon for a not completely untrained beginner like the one mentioned above. so if you don't want your confidence to be quashed, think twice before reading it. but this is no way the book's fault.

Stroustrup clearly shows that his expertise is in computing and not in writing with this book. If you comprehend everything that is in this book, you will definitely have an unbelieveable knowledge of this language. This book *might* work for a beginner to C++ but has significant expertise in other programming languages, but is certainly too advanced for a person that is new to programming altogether. His writing style leaves something to be desired. Stroustrup sometimes phrases ideas an an unnecessarily obscure/long-winded manner when concise wording is available. Sometimes his choice of adjectives/adverbs is questionable. This book can benefit from the input of someone with more expertise in writing. To his credit, I have yet to find anything actually *wrong* in this book, so at least the book is well-proofread (which, unfortunately, is not true for all C++ books....)

However, his writing flaws are nothing that cannot be overcome by a technically competent reader with a reasonable amount of diligence, and I strongly recommend this book for someone looking to take their C++ skills to the next level.