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The name of the game in this book is confusion. The title mentions ANSI-C++ and I have decided to believe the author's claim that he had compiled his examples with Borland C++ Builder. I shall leave open the question of why he was using

#include$$

instead of

or

.

Here are some additional confusing examples

• Target readers. The back cover claims 'Assumes no previous knowledge of programming.' while the preface states 'This book is aimed at programmers who wish ...'
• Teaching style and coding. The first chapter that introduces C++ has the following lines of code (p. 40)

  std::cin>>std::resetiosflags( std::ios::skipws ); 
  while(std::cin>>ch, !std::cin.eof()){ 
    std::cout<

1. The smallest problem here is the fact that operator! had not even been introduced.

2. std::cin

   is used all over the book. Nowhere could I find the directive using

   namespace std;

   not even in the chapter dealing with namespaces.
3. The usage of

   eof()

   is not a bug here, only because

   ch

   is of type

   char

   . I easily found a similar piece of code which was buggy (p. 402)

   int num; 
   while(cin>>num, !cin.eof()) { 
       // whatever 
   }

1. This causes an infinite loop if the input is not an integer.
2. Why not

   std::cin

   ? Because here,

   cin

   is a local variable!
3. The type of

   cin

   is

   istrstream

   , a type designated by the standard as depreciated.

Confused? So is the author of this book. However, while the author is able to write simple programs that will compile and may correctly run on some (definitely not all) input, the confused reader will hardly be able to acquire even this low-level skill. Not Recommended.

More examples of errors can be found on my pagehttp://www.cs.technion.ac.il/users/yechiel/CS/BadBooksC+C++.html#OOSCPPsmith