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The Microsoft Guide to C++ Programming by K Christian Recommended

ISBN: 1-55615-394-5       Publisher: Microsoft Press       Pages: 470pp       Price: £24-95

Categories:   object oriented     microsoft     beginner's c++

Reviewed by Francis Glassborow in C Vu 5-1 (Nov 1992)

I like this section and would commend it as basic reading for those who are trying to discover what OOP is. It occupies just over 80 pages and only needs to be read once. Though there is some source code in this section I doubt that any real benefit would be gained by typing it in and compiling it (the source code disk is available in this country for £17-95).

The second section is about C++ in general and it is well written and not that specific to MSC 7. The coverage is reasonable but I wish Kaare had mentioned more of the dangers of relying on defaults, particularly in situations such as 'copy constructors'.

Part 3 concentrates on the Microsoft Foundation Class Library. Superficially this would only interest those programming in MSC 7. In fact quite a number of developers have bought a cheap copy of MSC 7 just for MFC and rumour has it that other vendors of C++ for MSDOS & Windows environments may licence it from Microsoft in the future.

This part of the book is of no interest to programmers on other platforms.

The book concludes with two short but very useful appendices; one page on C++ Rules for Special Member Functions and six pages on C++ Constructors and Destructors.

Overall an excellent book well up with standard set by other Microsoft Press publications.