COS112-V ( my opinion of this module )

I'm sorry to say but this module could have been presented in a more "friendlier" manner ... similar to COS111-U. All that the study guide does is to highlight the sections and refer to it in the prescribed book .. THAT's IT! What about giving us more exercises on concepts ... i'm sure that if this module was presented in a way similar to COS111-U i would have understood the concepts quicker.What's the use of having problems in a prescribed book if we as the students don't have access to the solutions.We have to rely on doing the assignments and comparing UNISA's solutions to ours to see where we went wrong ... If we had more practice then we might be able to better ourselves and in the end score more with the assignments ..

Anyone else wanna comment on this ?

Quite an accurate summation of the material. The prescribed book is not te best book I've seen on C++. The order is a little ares end forward and the exercises are pathetic.
My 2 cents worth.
AndreB

What makes you think I'm a little dyslexic (spelling ???)
AndreB

i have to agree with u guys. The book is not an introductory course material and they assume that u have had some form of c++ experience.
i totally loathe the book and i stil need to do inheritence and vectors.

Hi fellow C++ coders,

I totally agree with you, i think this book we are curently using
isn't the friendliest book around. I started reading up on other books which can explain classes/object orientation and ADT a bit better.

As this book sucks at explaining it. And then to top it, in chapter 7 with classes, some of the constructor function definitions is missing, so there is no complete implementation and examples of classes and object orientation.

And i am also behind and still need to catch up to try and do Assignment 4 :-(.

Good luck to everyone.

Regards,
Adriaan

agreed. It is obvious that the authors are pretty good at what they do, but it does seem as though they think you have some or other kind of programming experience.

i agree with a couple of stuff as well, the book isn't much help on finer details (any question i had in cos111 i found an answer for in the study guide) the study guide isnt much of a study guide... okay i must admit here that i have done a course in java and java and c++ are very similar. that helped a bit but there is still stuff that need finer explaination.

but if i have to plat devils advocate: most of us are studying for a degree. And you cant expect to be "spoon fed". the stuff you work out yourself... "self discoveries" you wont forget, and thats where knowladge is gained...

but i still say C&D is a cruddy book...

coming from a CICS-Cobol environment, I found the book extremely confusing in places (i'm still trying to wrap my head around the whole OO concept - procedural code still haunts me)

i also found places in C&D where constructor functions et al are missing, which really threw a spanner in the spokes, as it were.

well, here's hoping - I've bought other books about C++, they should shed some more light on the subject (C++ for dummies type)

Hi Stewart
I bought C++ for dummies a year or 2 ago, and was not too impressed. I did find an All-in-One C++ Reference for dummies (7 books in one) which was a lot more useful. Also the Magraw Hill books tend to be of quite a high quality.
Cheers,
AndreB

Hi guys, sounds like nobody likes your study guide. I'll be doing the course next year. If your keen on a good, free resource, try Bruce Eckel's Thinking in C++, 2nd edition.

http://www.planetpdf.com/developer/article.asp?ContentID=6634

I pretty much learn C++ through this book and use the UNISA material just to make sure that I don't miss anything. If you're struggling, give it a bash, if you're not, stick it in your collection of cool, free stuff. (2 volumes).

He explains all your enums, unions, vectors, classes, concepts of OO, blah, blah. So reading through this thread you should find it helpful just for that.

-Valkeye

Hi Valkeye,
I've judt downloaded Thinking in C++ - Thanks
AndreB

Haha this is déjå vu. Loads of similar comments were made about C&D last year. It's not a really well structured book nor is it thoroughly checked for errors.

Have you guys come across the design fault in the [un]EzWin library yet. It got loads of posts last year when I was doing this course. The one were the window keeps disappearing. The most common solution is to use a "sleep" or an input loop to keep it visible. The problem with this is that the window freezes until the pause is over.

The best way to get around the problem was to declare all SimpleWindows as global variables. This miraculously solved the problem and if you moved another window in front of it, it was no longer smeared by the other window.

SimpleWindow mainWin("Main Window"); // defined globally
int ApiMain()
  {
  mainWin.Open();
  }

These kinds of design errors are all over the API and I can't understand why the course co-ordinators insisted on using C&D again.