kej@smunews.UUCP (Keith Jackson) (06/27/91)
I have Borland's TC++ Professional (am getting BC++ soon) and am generally
happy with the product. My only big complaint is that the documentation
just sucks! I'm a beginner to C++, and after reading their `Intro' book
and skimming the language definition, I still didn't feel like I knew
how to program in C++. Thinking that practice makes perfect, I dived into
a program with it, but came up sputtering and ended up making it half
C++, half C to finish in time (not recommended.) So I do have some limit-
ed experience w/ using it, and lots of experience w/ C. What I'd
like now is to find a good book which will do what Borland fails to do.
After digging through the ever so small collection of books on C++ at the
local Bookstop, I found that none of the books were what I needed. So
I'm looking for sage advice on finding a book. Of course, if the manuals
to the new BC++ (the one that does windows) will be any better, I'll
just wait until they arrive. However, I don't really trust Borland to
dazzle me with great documentation, the documentation to TC 1.5 was hor-
rible as well.
My requirements for a `good book' :
o Must assume a knowledge of C, or the `C primer' can't be a major
portion of it's contents.
o Must not waste my time telling me how to use the Turbo environ-
ment. The environment is intuitive and Borland devotes a whole
book to it (though I never had to open it.) As above, if in-
cluded, shouldn't be a major portion of it's contents.
o Should do a better job than Borland in introducing the C++ addi-
tions to C. This would be largely personal opinion, but anyone
else's experiences would be helpful. I would like it to have
more clarifying examples. The ones in the Borland manuals were
so limited in scope (no pun intended) that they only demonstrat-
ed the obvious and didn't really get into the variations avail-
able. This caused the different concepts to become `isolated'
from other concepts and was little help in showing how to com-
bine them. E.g. discussions on `friend' functions and how and
where to use them -- the Borland manual seemed to only hint
about them.
o Among the concepts to be discussed (and `integrated' with other
concepts as much as is reasonably possible) are streams. Bor-
land did a particularly horrible job of introducing them. In
the manual, it even says to print out the header files concern-
ing streams to see how to use the various functions. Not being
a C++ expert, I had much trouble trying to find the right
classes and/or functions to use in different situations. Their
introduction was no help (among other things, they neglected to
list BINARY as one of the attributes you can set when opening
files, though it is in the header file and they do talk _about_
using it) and they didn't provide anything in the way of a
stream class hierarchy description and function by function ex-
planations like they do for the standard library functions
(e.g. printf, malloc, etc.) This is probably the most impor-
tant quality of the book I'm looking for.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Email if possible, I'll
post results.
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Keith Jackson == jackson@csvax.seas.smu.edu
UN*X - live free or die