Ivor Horton's Beginning Visual C++ 2010

Question

How good this book is for learning C++? Has someone read it?

Answer 1

Without knowing the book, I would strongly suspect from the title that it teaches you "Visual C++" instead of C++. That is, it will likely teach you how the IDE works, the VC dialect of C++, and C++/CLI.
So if you want to learn C++, you'd better have a look at The Definitive C++ Book Guide and List.

However, if you indeed want to learn Visual C++, I'll step aside for someone who actually knows the book.

Answer 2

It could be that I'm being unfair to Ivor Horton but I remember reading his guide to MFC and it was dreadful. Admittedly, MFC was not a great technology to begin with but my recollection was that there was no proper explanation of what MFC can and can't do, where you can expect it to help you and where the pain points are. That was 10 years ago and maybe he (and/or his editor) has learned how to introduce material but for me, it's the type of publication that sits unused on your shelf for a few years and then, on finding that you can't give it away, ends up in the recycling bin.

My advice would be to begin with a book that is tool agnostic. Install the free Visual C++ 2010 Express Edition from Microsoft (if that's what you want to use) and get the first "Hello world" version working. Be patient, Visual Studio is well designed but it's still a fairly complex tool to start out with on your own.

Funnily enough, if you're looking for a good generic guide, the following tutorial on MSDN seems pretty good (I just skimmed through it though)

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/beginner/cc305129.aspx

For help with Visual C++ specifically, there's a guided tour on MSDN that should help you out. StackOverflow won't allow me to post a second link but if you search for "Visual C++ Guided Tour" on Google, it should be the first result you find.

Hope this helps,

-phil