I have about 30 years experience as a professional programmer. I started programming long before C+, and worked at Borland International on developing some of the first C+ compiler products.
I bought this book, along with "Game Programming for Teens" and "3D Game Programming". I was hoping this book would be a good introduction before the other two books. I had hoped this set of books would be a good way to introduce a 10 year old to programming.
This book includes a CD with examples of the code. But it doesn't include any compilers, or any of the tools you need to try the programs in the book. The author doesn't give you any hint of what version tools he is using for the programs in the book. I've not seen many teaching books that would omit such an important detail.
So, I downloaded Visual C++ 2008 Express and installed on the 10 yr olds computer.
The first thing I found is that examples do not work as is with Visual C++ Express 2008. Despite having done C++ programming for many years, I had to do some reasearch on google, as detailed below to figure out how to fix the programs from the book. I can't believe the reviewer who claimed to have almost no programming knowledge who claimed to down Visual Studio 2008 Express and successfully used it to learn programming this book.
And not the fault of the book, but I was dismayed to find that Visual Studio 2008 Express lacks some features that may be useful to a beginner:
- local help has very little information on the C++ language itself
- there are no really simple starting out examples
- when attempting to build (compile) the program, any errors noted in the output window can not be clicked to find the location in the source, as can be done with C# and more uplevel versions of Microsoft's development tools.
You'll find examples in the book using #include <iostream.h> which has been removed from Visual Studio 2008 C+. The also use direct output to cout, or input from cin, which is a syntax that doesn't work on Visual Studio 2008 C+.
Where the book says:
You'll instead need to write:
When a line in the book shows:
you will need to include the std:: namespace, like this:
There is nothing in the book to tell you about these differences.
So far it seems this is definitely not a book you can just hand someone and expect them to learn programming from it. I will wait a bit to post this review until I get some more to write about the response of the 10 year old to the book.
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The book also doesn't really give very many complete programs.