Concise and practical, it takes advantage of the Visual Studio 2008 IDE to teach you all the language features you'll use most in Windows applications, then ser... » 

Concise and practical, it takes advantage of the Visual Studio 2008 IDE to teach you all the language features you'll use most in Windows applications, then serves as a handy C++ reference that you can use every day.

Because Visual Studio is full of time-saving tools for repetitive program development tasks, it frees you to focus on the language structure & syntax. As a result, you can master the basics of C++ coding, which are the same whether you're working on .NET or coding native C++ on a console - in a minimum of time. Once you know the basics of building C++ programs, you're ready for rapid learning.

So you'll soon be adept at tasks like: handling numeric, date, and string data; working with loops, arrays, and collections; coding methods & event handlers; validating data & handling exceptions; and working with text, binary, and XML data. «