If you want to learn C++ this is not the book for you! The text covers much of the object-oriented approach to software engineering, but can be heavy reading. It offers little in the way of concise diagrams to hone the reader's interest, and packs in so much detail on the subject that most of the enormous tone can be ignored whilst still enabling the reader to gras the subject matter. (Which to be honest isn't riveting, but then we are talking about a specialist area of computers.) Not one of the better books on the subject, but the accompanying CD has enabled my programs to look better as it has a nice graphical developer application on it. Worse still, the price is ludicrously high and I would probably expect to pay only twenty pounds for it.