ISBN0-13-185757-6

I have this book and many other C++ books, have to say, Nay.
Definitely not for professional programmers.

Maybe OK for beginners, I am not too sure. Cause I think there are a few other books out there, that are better organized.

Only bright point: print quality is really good, formatting and page quality.

I learned C++ from this book and I came in having programming experience. However it is great for people who have no background in programming. It gives very clear, well-paced explanations and multiple examples on everything it covers- which is a lot (from the simple basics like for loops to the STL). I know that just about anything I need to look up can be found in this book. Highly recommended... My constructive criticism is that it lacks a way to look up something quickly (main point gets buried in long text and code examples). Sometimes the explanations of the code examples are a bit "dummied down" and tedious to read. Overall though I am glad the authors take the effort to make sure everything is clear, unlike other books. Finally, it would be nice if this book included more do's and don'ts found in a book like Meyers' Effective C++.

Well written and easy to understand. Good as both a reference lookup as well as a cover to cover read.

Its a pity that I should give this book 3 stars.The authour's have made a great job in writing a comprehensive introductory to intermidiate book for C++, this is one of the books in which the authours have tried to explain concepts deeply.
the book has a lot of different parts that help you undrestand the things which were talked about in the chapter, for example one of those parts is "common programming error" which has a red symbol and a thumb pointing down and it tells you about some common mistakes that are made about the syntax that was just taught.
However, although the text has tried to teach deeply and clear, it fails to approach all of those information in a good manner.
For example the book gives you an example code tries to teach you functions( the whole idea of return types and passing and returning), classes, objects, private and public member functions and class variables all in one section.it would have been much better if they taught functions first and then passing variables and then returning expressions and at last classes and object, why they want to teach all of these in one section? you should ask the authours.
Another problem of this book which might not be supposed so important is its chapter introductions, imagine you dont know anything about functions and objects from before and then in the introduction of chapter 3 the authour explains the sections of the chapter for instance he says that in the third section of this chapter we will look at software reusibality with the classes.this introduction will do nothing except confusing and scaring you.

last but not least, this book will use terms that it has not given any definitions for, it will call the functions in your class , the member functions of your class and it will use the word " argument" for the stuff inside the brackets of your functions before ever telling you what argument means, and if you are a beginner these words will confuse you.

in short I recommend this book to you if you have access to a teacher/professor. If you are an absolute begginer like I used to be when I bought this book, go get Accelerated C++: practical programming by example by Andrew Koenig and Barbara E. Moo but remember that Accelerated C++ will not get as far as this book gets, again this is a very good book from the point of view of the things that it has,but it fails to go through all this good stuff in a clear manner.

This whole series is great for beginner to intermediate programmers. C++ is a great language to learn some of the more advanced concepts in programming anyway (though a tough one to start out on). I recommend Java to start with and then C++ for topics such as namespaces, pointer manipulation, stack use and address issues since most of these are left to the java virtual machine and not easily accessible in java. Deitles' books cover topics in a "from the basics" point of view and there is usually some part of that knowlege that is missing or left out of a given programming class.