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Comment by stormbrew | Hacker News Reader

The best introductory text to modern C++ is, in my opinion, Accelerated C++ by Moo and Koenig. It's concise and teaches the language instead of spending 6 chapters teaching fundamental algorithms (yet another broken linked list class!) or OO principles (which often results in terrible C++).

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Is this the book that evolves a student-grading application over 300+ pages? If so, I honestly do not understand why people call this book concise.

If you know C already, the pace of the book is so slow that you'll lose interest.

It's more targeted at people who do not know C. Koenig argues that building on C knowledge to learn C++ is a bad idea. They discuss this in the preface of the book.

Though I also recommend this book, their example code teaches bad habits (such as assignment within conditionals and horrendous compound statements) which should be avoided in any sort of production code.

Do you have any examples? I just flipped through the book and couldn't find any. Accelerated C++ was my first ever programming book. It was quite a doozy to get through at the time, but I feel like I'm forever indebted to it. Koenig's attention to detail and ability to explain what the machine is actually doing and the consequences in your code is still unmatched as far as I can tell.

median = size % 2 == 0 ? (homework[mid] + homework[mid-1]) / 2 : homework[mid];

In my opinion the ternary operator is misused here when an if/else would have been clearer.

Ah yeah, that is one beefy line of code. I can agree with that.

Well, you omitted the all important const qualifier which would be a decent reason to use the ternary operator.

I actually like using the ternary operator in this sort of assignment, so I only need to type the variable name once instead of 3 times. The only real problem in your example is that everything is in one line. It woulf be better to indent that and to add some extra parenthesis to make the precedence clearer.

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