For illustration of the radically different style let us take a look at the first chapter. It's amazing how many C++ concepts can be explained just by using the simple "Hello World" program as an example. Already within the first dozen pages, the reader learns about the following: 

• Lexical conventions such as the syntax for C++ comments and string literals
• The distinction between core language and standard library abstractions
• Program organization into definitions and headers
• #include directives and standard headers
• Statements and blocks, braces, and semicolons
• Names and namespaces, scopes and scope operator
• Output streams and output operators
• Types and objects
• Expression evaluation, side-effects, associativity of operators. 

Taking a look at the book as a whole, you can observe that it basically falls into two parts. Roughly the first half of the book concentrates on examples of using the standard library abstractions. The second half of the book talks about defining your own abstractions. This is an uncommon, yet very sensible approach to the language. Before learners can consider implementing reusable abstractions themselves, they probably first want to know how to use the existing abstractions. 

In addition to these two parts, Accelerated C++ contains two appendices that give an excellent overview of the language features and library abstractions. The level of detail provided in these two appendices is just right?not too many details but enough to render them useful as quick references. 

This book is definitely worth reading. Although the book's didactic approach is unusual, the book is not at all shallow?nor does it miss important points. Indeed, the choice of topics is very good. Readers learn most of what they would be learning in a classic C++ introduction. At the same time, the authors avoid overwhelming their readers with details of each and every language feature. For instance, they include advanced concepts such as smart pointers and reference counting, which you don't normally find in introductory C++ textbooks. Conversely, you won't find a detailed discussion of how to overload each overloadable operator, which is sometimes discussed at length in regular C++ textbooks, because it's simply not an everyday issue for novice C++ programmers. For the beginner it's more important to be productive in practice as soon as possible rather than to know all the available language features in theory. 

Accelerated C++: Practical Programming By Example can be used for learning C++ if a programmer already knows C. But it's probably even more interesting to a C++ programmer who has rudimentary knowledge of C++ (such as after a regular "Introduction to C++" class) and who seeks deeper understanding of it. 

Angelika Langer develops and teaches classes on Java, C++, multithreading, and internationalization. She is an internationally recognized speaker and served on the ANSI/ISO C++ Committee from 1993 to 1998. Klaus Kreft is a software architect and senior consultant with 15+ years of experience in industrial software development. He currently works for Siemens Business Services in Germany. Langer and Kreft are authors of "Standard C++ IOStreams and Locales" (Addison-Wesley, 2000) and are columnists for the C/C++ Users Journal.