Uneven composite. Not bad, not great. Gotta have it anyway., 9 Aug 1999

This book is a hacked composite of some of Calvert's BCB3 text, with additional stuff by several bright authors whose pedagogical talent is less polished.

This is a Borland VCL book, not a C++ book. The problem is this: audience. If you are a Delphi user looking for C++ skills (because you fear that Object Pascal is a lame duck), you won't get enough, because you already know the VCL and the C++ fundamentals are missing. For example, the template inheritance example on page 135 is syntactically complex, and nothing is done to clarify it. Add to that the authors' tendency to do C++ code as if it were Object Pascal, with VCL style and naming conventions, and you aren't exactly getting ready for the mainstream.

Conversely, if you are a Microsoft VC++ user, looking for a more productive RAD environment, which BCB4 certainly is, you will find that the Pascal VCL conventions are a bit mysterious and irritating. You will pick up enough to be productive, but in the end the whole VCL is written in Delphi, so you'll probably have to get more comfortable with the Object Pascal world than you'd like. This is not a major problem, but C++ is more than an OP clone, it deserves a little more tender loving. The sections on the allegedly vital STL, part of the ANSI standard stuff that Borland claims makes BCB4 a much purer C++ than VC++, are minimal.

The Reisdorph "Teach yourself BCB4" books are probably great for the Delphi emigrants, filling in the gaps, but for the VC++ refugees, they are too basic, so this book is IT. Amazingly, you will still have to figure out a lot all by yourself. For instance neither the product manuals nor Unleashed cover things like how you select which .lib files to link to.

Is this to suggest that BCB4 does not stand alone as a pure C++ environment? No, it's just that it's not well documented by anyone. So here we are. Making the best of an outstanding tool (BCB4) that is underpromoted, even in the book department. Even the examples on the CD seem rushed, their numbers for instance don't match up with numbers they have in the text.

All of that does nothing to diminish the value of what is here, a wealth of material on a highly productive tool that you won't find anywhere else. At least all of the material is in print, not only in .PDF format on the CD like with some previous Unleashed volumes. You have 1200 pages dealing with a lot of topics pretty well. This is one of the very few books on BCB4, so you have little choice, and it's fortunately worth buying.

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