24 hours? Oceans of time! I had "Teach Yourself C++ in 10 minutes".
I had done some MSX-BASIC, but after we got a "real" PC I wanted to learn a "real" and modern language. This is what they had at the local bookshop.
The "10 minutes" is done by explaining what C++ is and then it declares "there, in the last 10 minutes I explained things and you now know what C++ is". Ehh...
I didn't understand a lot of it. Chapter 5 or so is templates. It's pretty thin, and just rushes past things and never takes the time to really explain anything. It may be somewhat suitable if you're experienced in other languages, but it's absolutely not suitable for beginners. Visual Studio also didn't help (at the time I thought you needed VS to program on Windows – it was 1999, we didn't have internet, and I was 14, so what did I know?)
Aside from being a border-line scam, these books are worse than useless and actively harmful. As a result of this book I gave up programming for years, thinking I just didn't have what it takes. Wasn't until years later that I discovered this "Linux" and then "FreeBSD" thing that I discovered you can "just" write programs with "just" a text editor, and that things like Perl and Python and C exist.
If you see one of these things at the bookshop you should steal it and throw it out. Haha, only serious.
Reminds me a lot of when I was 13 and had learned Visual Basic 6 and wanted to make a game so my mother bought me a book on how to make games. “How to make games” she said excitedly as she handed me the book. “How to Make Games” it indeed did say. It also said under it “in C++ and OpenGL”. I had no idea what I was doing or what was going on. Enter high school. An elective called “Computer concepts and programming” was the only computer class outside of “Keyboarding”. It was taught by a female teacher who used to write punch cards for a living. She introduced us to C. All of the sudden, that book from a few years ago clicked in my brain and next thing I knew, I was writing games in C++. They were crap. Horrible performance. But I made them from scratch.
Fast forward another decade and then a lot of these Packt publishing style books on making games and learning coding - except for the holy grail of book series - GPU Gems… if you ever want to feel stupid, go read some GPU Gems articles. Today there’s a lot of choices - PBR - Vulkan - anything Eric Lengyel.
I still feel like it’s a trap. All these “Teach yourself…” should really be titled “Become obsessed with…”
I had done some MSX-BASIC, but after we got a "real" PC I wanted to learn a "real" and modern language. This is what they had at the local bookshop.
The "10 minutes" is done by explaining what C++ is and then it declares "there, in the last 10 minutes I explained things and you now know what C++ is". Ehh...
I didn't understand a lot of it. Chapter 5 or so is templates. It's pretty thin, and just rushes past things and never takes the time to really explain anything. It may be somewhat suitable if you're experienced in other languages, but it's absolutely not suitable for beginners. Visual Studio also didn't help (at the time I thought you needed VS to program on Windows – it was 1999, we didn't have internet, and I was 14, so what did I know?)
Aside from being a border-line scam, these books are worse than useless and actively harmful. As a result of this book I gave up programming for years, thinking I just didn't have what it takes. Wasn't until years later that I discovered this "Linux" and then "FreeBSD" thing that I discovered you can "just" write programs with "just" a text editor, and that things like Perl and Python and C exist.
If you see one of these things at the bookshop you should steal it and throw it out. Haha, only serious.