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The ACCU passes on review copies of computer books to its members for them to review. The result is a large, high quality collection of book reviews by programmers, for programmers. Currently there are 1949 reviews in the database and more every month.
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Title:
Problem Solving Using C++
Author:
Yuksel Uckan
ISBN:
0 697 22466 X
Publisher:
Irwin
Pages:
820pp
Price:
£?
Reviewer:
Francis Glassborow
Subject:
beginner's c++
Appeared in:
10-3
Sadly this book has dated very badly (personally I think it was badly dated when it was published in 1995). The material is hardly going to challenge your intellect. Indeed I would happily use this as a text for an average ability class of 15-year olds. It isn't until over half way through that the author even considers object-orientation (which he thinks is a relatively recent paradigm - that would be news to Smalltalk programmers, which language was itself based on the OO concepts developed by Simula in the mid-60s).

The author has a very narrow view of problem solving but even that is not adequately developed in the text and end of chapter exercises.

Perhaps the flavour of the book is well exemplified by the following definition of an OOP:

A program in which the real world is modeled using abstractions such as classes and objects is an object-oriented program.

Ignoring the spelling mistake (not really excusable considering the tools available to check spelling) this definition hardly helps. A quick check reveals that the author defines an object as a variable of class type.

Each chapter includes a section titled 'Improve Your Problem-Solving Ability'. This is a complete misnomer. They are just debugging exercises. For example on page 525 (by which time you should be more than half way through your course of study) we have:

Explain why the following code will not compute a correct value for sum.

#include<iostream.h>
void main()
	{
	int i;
	unsigned int sum = 0;
	for (i=5; i>= -10; i--)
		sum = sum + i;
	// end for
	cout<< "\nSum: "<< sum;
}
// end function main
By the way, the author lists 44 reserved words (keywords) in an appendix. The 1991 edition ofThe C++ Programming Languagelists 48.

Frankly, were I the author I would be embarrassed. I'll retract my earlier statement, I wouldn't even use this book with a class of 15-year olds they would learn too much that is not true.