The book fits well into the style of the series of "Teach Yourself ... in One Hour a Day". Each chapter, which the authors term a lesson, is bite-sized. I can readily envisage a typical neophyte to programming (of any language) being able to assimilate its contents in roughly an hour. Keep in mind that if you have never encountered this series before, then don't take too literally the one hour limit, as far as understanding the text in each chapter. Some chapters will naturally be more important and cover more complex concepts than others. If you need extra time, take it. The shoehorning into an hour is only an approximation. What might be the simpler chapters? One could be that on controlling program flow, using while, do-while and for loops. The most important item in this chapter is that you should use these constructs whenever possible, in place of goto. Yes, you can use goto in C++. But the book warns that this leads to spaghetti code. Tangled and difficult to debug and extend. Goto is a tempting shortcut to beginners that must be resisted. A more complicated chapter is on pointers.
Describing the some of the myriad ways that they can be used and misused. There is ample warning about pointer errors. The book does not do a comparative analysis with other languages. But you should know that the designers of Java thought pointer bugs in C/C++ were so numerous and miserable that pointer arithmetic has been essentially banned in Java. Yeah, you want to be a C++ programmer; why else would you be considering this book? That's fair enough. But it doesn't hurt to know some of the key differences between C++ and its major alternative, which seems to be Java. If nothing else, this particular difference can keep you focused on very carefully writing pointer code.
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