Well I strongly disagree with both the last two posts. Pointers are not an essential part of OOP and C++, although it may have all the essential features of OOP, also has a awful lot of other stuff. I believe that it's not a good place to start learning OOP.
I challenge anyone who had C++ as their first programming language to show a sample of their code which is used in a real world application and shows good use of OOP.

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Joe (Microsoft MVP - XML)