C and C++ Programming Books That Made a Great Impression on the Author

There are many lists of great books but we'd like to share the one that have a more personal touch. These books we wanted to read on the first sight and devoured them when we had an occasion.

First book that made a great impression on me was C Programming Language which we saw and read in 1987 (in Russian translation with very nice hardcover binding). There was a C implementation available on a PDP-11 clone we worked with at that time.

Another book that reinforced our better function prototype reading and pointer declarations was Expert C Programming.

We confess we had a trouble understanding C++ long back ago despite reading The C++ Programming Language by Bjarne Stroustrup (reading several editions) and Effective C++ series by Scott Meyers partly because of our long practice of Win32 programming using C and partly because we didn't understand why we needed C++ to do the same. Popular books such as C++ for Real Programmers (in Russian translation) terrified us with their complexity (although we made honest efforts to read them from cover to cover). However, when we saw and started reading the book Advanced CORBA Programming with C++ we really understood why we needed C++ and how it all worked. After that rereading The C++ Programming Language and (More) Effective C++ books was a great pleasure.

The other part of C++, STL was greatly clarified by reading the following book in 2003 from cover to cover (at that time the first edition): The C++ Standard Library: A Tutorial and Reference.

Inside the C++ Object Model book clarified C++ implementation issues and helped later with crash dump analysis of C++ programs.

We plan to continue this “Great Impression” series with other topics and also to publish a recommended reading list for C++ based on books from our personal library that started growing when the author was an employee at Programming Research in 2001 - 2003:

The row of books is all about C++. Except the big thick red book about English language grammar (at that time we became interested in other grammars than C++): The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.