First of all, thanks for making this excellent book.

This book is really easy to understand.. unlike a few other books that, compared to this, is more like a quasi-linguistic adventure. This book is actually entertaining to read! A well-structured content and a good looking convention (without mentioning titles.. some books can make your eyes bleed). You cover a wide specter of topics and actually manage to come up with good practical examples.

Thank you for focusing on the standards. For most people I know, there is no C++, but only Visual C++. After reading your book and looking at some of the "VC++ code" I have been presented to one year ago when I started looking at C++, im shocked that some those projects even compile. :)

You also talk about cross-platform development, something that wasnt even mentioned in the 10+ other books I evaluated before buying the correct one. Luckily I discovered Devcpp, the (excellent and) free C++ IDE using MingGW, so my goals of making code that compiles on Windows, Linux and Mac will be much easier to fulfiled (I hope).

I've been programming for over 10 years. I've been using everything from BASIC to Motorola 680x0 asm, but I have been working with Java for the last 4-5 years. I wanted a challenge and started looking at C++ in my spare time. This book was perfect for me.

However, one thing I noticed was...

On page 37 in DatabaseTest.cpp Kleper is given a salary of 100.000 and Solter 10.000. Solter is then given a promotion that adds 1000 to his salary. Now, we all know by now that something is fishy!

Questions:
a) Did Kelper write this code giving himself a higher salary?
b) Did Solter initially write this code giving both a 10.000 salaray and then promoting himself hoping Kelper didnt notice, but Kelper did notice and added added an extra zero to his salary as a "last minute adjustment"?

Cheers and keep up the good work :)

Thanks for the kind words! We certainly tried to take a different approach to covering the language -- I wouldn't have had the patience to write a typical C++ book.

I had to look back at the edits to answer your question. I wrote most of Chapter 1, including the code in question. I originally gave myself $100,000 and Nick $10,000 just to see if he'd notice. Nick attempted to "correct" his salary on his first edit, assuming that it was merely an oversight on my part. I rejected the change but threw him the promotion as a compromise. Nice catch!

Scott



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Scott J. Kleper
Author, "Professional C++"
(Wrox, 2005)