The C++ Programming Language: Special Edition [Special Edition] [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

Another major improvement is the section on 'advice' which can be found at the end of every chapter. This portion summarizes what the chapter was trying to teach, with pointers to the relevant part of the book.

As a tutorial for the beginner, I suggest you look elsewhere. The book is not easy to read, since the author tries to explain so much in so little space (if you can call 900 pages 'little').

You will probably read this book more than TWICE. First, to simply try out the language on your compiler (sit in front of your computer when you do). Second, to digest the material on designing using C++ (try doing this away from your computer). Third, to see if you missed out anything significant. You will.

However, this book is, like all of the previous editions, NOT a language/programming tutorial. To read this book, you will need tons of C++ & OOP knowledge, even if you are an ace C programmer (since C is quite different from C++ in "The Way of Thinking"). Especially, if you are a novice, please read one or two "good" primer book before coming to this one, otherwise you will get lost easily. (Believe me, it's happened to me before when I tried to read the 2nd edition).

Moreover. In this edition, the author, Bjarne Stroustrup, added 2 more appendixes on "locales" and "standard library exception safety", which would make this book even more useful and more complete than any previous editions. And would make this become "A Bible" for C++ Programmaing Language.

If you are a "serious" C++ programmer (or wannabe), you can't get anything better than this. This is a MUST!

That said, this is a truly amazing book. You will never, ever, ever find a more in depth description of the language, it's features and caveats, and how to make the language do what you want it to do and make programming simple in large systems. When you reach a certain point it isn't as simple as "okay let's have a class with some get and set methods here". You must have a thorough understanding of some extremely advanced features, and this book will definitely get you to that point if you put in the time. The way the explanations are worded and the examples that are given are difficult to understand because there's no simple way to explain such advanced concepts. And if you are one of the people that think there _is_ an easy way to explain such concepts in the same amount of detail, I invite you to go find an easy explanation of mathematical Field Theory or Quantum Physics.

If you are smart, part of the target audience, and mature enough to handle it, I doubt you will be able to find a better book.

And for those who are still convinced that simpler is better, I wonder if you can explain to me *why* overriding a function in a derived class makes all of its overloads in the base class inaccessible.