

Tier One: C++ Beginner's Guide - free before December 31, 2010 - Uncle_Sam
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/cc305129.aspx

======
jfr
Note: it is from Herbert Schildt. This name should ring a bell for many
competent C or C++ programmers, as the technical quality and accuracy of his
books are frequently disputed, and for many regarded as synonymous of bad
quality.

~~~
gcb
some in depth points on that criticism.

<http://www.developerdotstar.com/community/node/781>

disclaimer, i haven't read the book. but if teaching cpp while he was really
teaching C was his crime, than i will probably be on his side when i do read
the book :)

~~~
chc
That's considerably less in-depth than the criticism itself. The post you
linked is mainly complaining about how mean some people were to Schildt and
brushes aside the criticism on the basis that Schildt had good intentions.
You'll notice that he tries to link the widespread criticism of Schildt's
books (I mean, it's in the "learn C" newsgroup FAQ) with some anonymous
trolls' death threats against blogger Kathy Sierra. It's basically the "LEAVE
BRITNEY ALONE!" of the programming world.

I also think that post's phrasing has confused you. When he says "teaching C
in practice," he doesn't mean teaching C-isms in a C++ book — he means C as it
is (incorrectly) used in practice, such as teaching implementation-dependent
assumptions and pretending that they're part of the standard, as well as
simply wrong code that might appear to work right "in practice" in certain
situations. For example, his "Annotated ANSI C Standard" stated that void
main(void) was a valid main function and that padding only appears at the end
of structs.

------
tbrownaw
So c-style arrays and strings (and the C string functions) are discussed in
chapter 4, exceptions and templates are chapter 12 "advanced topics", and in
the discussion of arrays you're encouraged to write your own array class if
you need bounds checking.

I don't see mention of std::vector (which has .at() for bounds-checked access)
or std::string , maybe I just missed it not reading very thoroughly.

I don't think I like this book, it seems to encourage some rather bad
practices...

------
wyclif
Avoid this book and get Scott Meyer's _Effective C++: 55 Specific Ways to
Improve Your Programs and Designs_ instead:

[http://www.amazon.com/Effective-Specific-Improve-Programs-
De...](http://www.amazon.com/Effective-Specific-Improve-Programs-
Designs/dp/0321334876/)

