Author Description

Though C++ has made inroads into CS-1 only recently, textbooks to serve that growing market have begun to proliferate. Lee, et. al., is distinguished by its software engineering approach. On page 1, the authors present an analogy: Just as the skills of using building materials (such as bricks and lumber) and the associated tools (trowel, saw, hammer) do not enable one to build a house, so programming skills alone do not prepare a computer science student to pursue a career as a software engineer--the occupation of choice for many CS majors. Thus, The Apprentice C++ Programmer teaches programming in the context of the software engineering process. It takes advantage of the object orientation of C++ to emphasize TTtop downUT programming before getting into the details. For instance, the concepts of TTobjectsUT and TTtypesUT are introduced before any C++ code. Similarly, in the early stages of the book, the emphasis is on running and modifying software supplied on the accompanying disk rather than writing programs from scratch.