C++ Programming in easy steps 5th Edition

I'm a computer science professor at a community college, and a big fan of the "in easy steps" series. Among them, the C, C++ and C# books by Mike McGrath are superior to any other books I've seen for those new to these languages. Aside from being colorful and visually appealing, the projects in the book are easy to follow, and the concepts are well explained. For the impatient (and those of us with technical ADD), the tutorials are broken into perfectly sized increments such that they can be set aside and resumed easily. Not only that, each chapter results in the immediate gratification of a working program/tool. The entire book wraps up with a GUI lottery app. All for a bargain price.Frankly, I'm shocked that I'm the first one to review this treasure of a book. I recommend it to all of my C++ students.

This book has a lot of great information for those just getting started with a very difficult programming language like C++. You're not going to find and end up text that will tell you the ins and outs of the language, but it is going to be a great start. The book does not read like some text written by several people with phds and computer science, it actually is very easy to read and follow along, this is what made me buy it.

I bought this to help some of my colleagues get better acquainted with C++ for DIY electronics with Arduino and other micro-controllers. It's a great tool and I highly recommend for anyone that wants a new hobby, or even a nice reference for the simple stuff you may forget over the years.

The book is small - a major plus when the majority of my textbooks are ginormous. The graphics and text are colorful and there are a lot of great examples throughout the text to emphasize each concept. Great book for first time programmers and first time C++ developers!

While I have experience writing C code, I haven't used C++ in the Visual Studio. This book is easy to follow and is a good beginning source.

i'm new to programming and the 1200 pg comprehensive c++ book we use in the course i'm taking is sometimes difficult for me to follow. this book makes all the major topics easy to understand. it is also helpful as a quick reference and to review for exams.

I am new to C++ and bought this book as an introduction. That seems to be exactly what this book is. It assumes no prior programming experience and begins with how to install a compiler. There are 10 chapters which largely illustrate running approximately 70 C++ files available for download.The first five chapters introduce concepts likely common to many computer languages: variables, arrays, arithmetic, logic statements, loops, if statement, functions, modifying strings, reading and writing external files.Through this point I felt very good about the book. Until I realized I had not learned to read or write anything but the most trivial and largely useless toy data sets. The computer files covered in the book generally address one concept each, which is helpful if the concept is entirely new. Even still I would prefer the example files perform an operation that might be useful in a practical setting.Chapter 6 covers pointers and references. These concepts were largely new to me and after working through this chapter I still felt pretty good about the book.Then I got to Chapters 7 and 8 which covered what McGrath considered the three principles of object-oriented programming: encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism. Here the book suddenly became opaque. The concepts were new and confusing and the text suddenly seemed to consist of a couple of brief paragraphs of impenetrable jargon. Here is where I really began to wish the chapters were longer, that the text was clearer and that the example files more clearly illustrated practical operations. To make matters worse the first example program for Chapter 8, classptr.cpp, would not compile. I had to post a question on Stack Overflow to get it to run. To be fair all other programs that came with the book did run and returned the expected result.Chapter 9 covers miscellaneous odds and ends several of which have the obvious potential to be helpful, such as debugging code, creating macros, viewing a list of predefined macros.Chapter 10 tries to present an example of using Microsoft Visual Studio but does so with an outdated version of that software. The changes between Visual Studio 2017 and 2019 are so extensive that this chapter was, to me, worthless.This book is a good supplement to more thorough texts. You will learn a wide variety of operations many of which will be useful later. And at a price under $10.00 it is hard to complain about the value. But you will not become an expert based on this book. You likely will not even develop many practical skills. You will simply have become aware of many concepts that will require much more extensive study later to be of much use. And you will have a library of C++ files that illustrate concepts in a minimalist manner.

I've borrowed this book from the library and had to have it for my library at home. It's easy to read and the instructions are easy to follow.