The Barnes & Noble Review Bruce Eckel, one of the world's best programming trainers, has thoroughly updated his classic THINKING IN C++—the book that won the Software Development Magazine Jolt Cola award in its first iteration. The new version is better than ever—which is to say, it's pretty awesome. There are more examples and a raft of new practice exercises. The book now fully reflects the ANSI/ISO C++ standard. There's excellent new coverage of C designed to get newbies up-to-speed so they can really fly with C++. (There's even a comprehensive, CD-ROM based C tutorial!) Best of all, the book reflects the incredible amount of user feedback Eckel gets, both as a seminar presenter, and at his outstanding eckelobjects.com web site. Fortunately, Eckel hasn't changed the approach that made Thinking In C++ so praiseworthy in the first place. He still approaches C++ from a holistic, design viewpoint—not simply as a random collection of features. Says Eckel, "you want to build a model in your head that allows you to understand the language all the way down to the bare metal; if you encounter a puzzle, you'll be able to feed it to your model and deduce the answer." The coverage remains "bite sized" and highly modular, with simple, easy-to-digest examples, each one building on its predecessors. Put simply, you'll never find a more coherent presentation of C++. Nor a more thorough presentation. From the basics of objects and data abstraction to organizing your code, implementation hiding, initializing, cleanup,functionoverloading, constants, name control and namespaces, operator overloading, inheritance, polymorphism, and virtual functions, it's all here. (Tip: Look for a Volume II soon, covering exception handling, design patterns, advanced features in the Standard C++ Library, and more.)