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Comment by marquis | Hacker News Reader

Anything similar to this for C++? We're looking for good teaching books at the moment.

Modern C++ Design (Andrei Alexandrescu)[1] is wonderful, but C++11 has "simplified" much of what he covers. If you want to be able to read the C++11 standard[2] with little effort, Alexandrescu's book is nevertheless a good primer.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Design-Generic-Programming-Patt...

[2] http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2012/n333...

First or second books? Stroustrups Programming Principle and Practice is quite good as a starter book. Not quite C++11, if I remember correctly, but further along than just C with Classes.

There's also Alexandrescus "Modern C++" book, but even that is now a decade old. We'll have to see what turns up in the wake of the recent standard, so far it's mostly introductions to new features and some updated references, useful for someone getting reacquainted with modern features, but no K&R of C++11 yet.

The new edition of the C++ Primer is helping me quite a bit. It explicitly notes which things are from C++11 and which aren't, and they talk quite a bit about the new stuff.

I had tried to learn from Stroustrup before C++11 and didn't get as far.

I'm reading C++ Primer 5/e at the moment and I'm enjoying it so far. I like how it starts using the hight level containers before introducing other more low-level structs. The second part is a nice overview of the C++ Library so you won't end reinventing the wheel when writing your first programs.

Also the Kindle edition is really well done. The biggest flaw of this book is that's huge.

It would be hard to write a short introduction to C++ that didn't leave you pretty unprepared though.

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