Re: a great C++ book?

[Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com>]

On Tue, Jan 01, 2002 at 12:25:10PM -0600, Oliver Xymoron wrote:
> On Mon, 31 Dec 2001, samson swanson wrote:
> 
> > hello again,
> >
> > i ask this group because i trust in your intellect.
> >
> > For a beginner to C++ what is your favorite book? A
> > book that goes in depth of teaching the language.
> > remeber i am  a beginner, new to c++.
> 
> If you already know C well, Bjarne Stroustrup's "The C++ Programming
> Language" is decent. If not, start with Kernighan and Ritchie's "The C
> Programming Language". Put the two next to each other and you might gain
> some insight into the creeping horror that modern C++ has become.

It's hard to explain a love/hate relationship with C++.  I think many
systems programmers come to a point where they can "speak" C++ and do so
in design conversations all the time, talking about the "objects" and the
"methods", etc.  But they program in C.  

This sends a somewhat mixed message to the casual observer who might think
that one language or the other is "better".  The reality is that you want
tp program in a fairly object oriented way but you also want to avoid
"the creeping horror that modern C++ has become.".

Makes you wonder what would happen if someone tried to design a
minimalistic C++, call it the "M programming language", have be close
to C with the minimal useful parts of C++ included.

I've always said that if I get rich I'm going to fund some extensions to
GCC to make associative arrays be a built in type, to make perl like
regex's be a first class object, but maybe I was wrong, maybe I want to
fund "M" :-)  Sort of a moot point, I'm not rich.
-- 
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Larry McVoy            	 lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitmover.com/lm