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This book is somewhat unusual. Let the text speak for itself: 'This book uses a procedural or non-object-oriented approach to learning how to program in C++ ... emphasises business applications and modular structured design ... Topics excluded are object-oriented programming, classes, inheritance, unions, function and operator overloading, virtual functions, polymorphism and related items.' It is a teaching/learning text for writing COBOL programs in C++.

If, gentle reader, you have continued thus far, you may be interested to know that its approach to program design unashamedly makes much use of global variables on the basis that 'Global variables .. are often used to construct corporate applications ..'. This is contrasted with '.. local variables [which] are used .. in software packages .. for retail sales'.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the

main()

s lack a specified return type and the headers are of the

.h

variety. I could continue.

In summary then, the book contains some potentially useful elements, such as a large number of exercises with answers - but I guess relatively few C++ programmers use the language for the sort of business batch processing shown. More serious flaws are in the style of coding, the non-idiomatic usage and the approaches taken which are not ISO Standard. The greatest problem I have with the book is its over-limited treatment of this very rich language. As a simple, modern introduction to programming in C++ there are some more appropriate texts. (e.g. by Johnsonbaugh and Kalin, or, at a more elementary level, Douglas Bell.)