Worst. Programming. Book. Ever.

I have no idea how this book has ANY reviews over 1 star, much less the several 5 star ones. This is without a doubt the WORST programming book I've ever read. To frame this, I've been programming in some capacity since high school in 1981 and professionally for almost 30 years. So why would I pick up such a book in the first place? Most of my work has been in other languages, primarily Java with a decent amount of C and C# among others. But very little C++, and that little bit was quite early in my career. I thought this might be a handy book to help refresh my memory and fill in the gaps on it's unique properties. Unfortunately I've never read anything so poorly written with so many errors both grammatical and factual. (Kids, don't drink and write!) He starts off saying you don't need to know C, but I feel sorry for anyone trying to use this book who doesn't. Especially because you'll be learning a lot that is bad or just plain wrong and won't realize it. The Q & A sections are worthless. The questions are sloppily written and ambiguous - this is programming, and precision is everything. The format for these is that there is a section with a number of questions, most multiple choice, followed by an answer section where the questions are repeated and the answer highlighted. But FREQUENTLY the repeated version of the question is somewhat different from what was asked in the first place, to the degree that it changes the answer. In the section on switch / case, there is a question to write a bit of code to assign grades using a switch, but the answer is a complete nonsensical mess that would be wholly unacceptable in a first year programming class. And if you're completely new to C / C++, you're going to be totally lost as there are often questions asked about things that haven't even been hinted at in the text to that point. I'm all for challenging readers, especially in books that are meant to teach new concepts. But normally you would at least give pointers to further information or something of the sort. I purchased the Kindle version, and sadly the presentation is nearly as bad as the content. The layout is sloppy with odd font sizes in places and text flowing awkwardly around the code examples. And speaking of the code examples, almost all of them are truncated, losing at least one or two lines at the end of each. Sometimes it's not much of a problem, only losing a closing bracket. But with others you lose enough to miss the whole point of the example. I almost wish I had the print version so I could at least get the satisfaction of burning the horrid thing.

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