Unfortunately, the book is not intended to help you develop C++ projects. Rather, the book is intended to allow you to utilize Visual C++ to enhance your VB applications. The first half of the book relates to the basic C++ syntax, pointers, and OOP concepts, the latter half of the book focuses almost entirely on deploying COM objects with Visual C++.

In other words, this book will NOT take a VB programmer and make him a C++ applications developer. It would certainly give him a boost in that direction, with some guidance from other resources; however, that is not the objective of this book. The objective is clearly to help VB programmers supplement their VB projects with C++ components.

Morrison has an approachable writing style. He tends to take the approach, "Here's what you might do in VB, now here's how the same thing looks in C++". I like that approach, but unfortunately it sometimes comes with pages upon pages of mundane VB source code and its C++ counter-blob. C++ files are seperated by source code comments, or sometimes not at all, with poor consistency. I would rather have seen either a tree diagram of the final file structure or a digital copy of the source on the CD-ROM. I'm rather irritated with the publisher for including a CD-ROM that doesn't have a copy of the source code from the book! There should have been PLENTY of room left over to throw in the source. Fortunately, the source code can still be downloaded from the publisher's web site.

One important thing that should be noted: This book is mistitled. It should be __VISUAL__ C++ for VB Programmers, not C++ for VB Programmers. The book clearly targets the Microsoft VC++ IDE.

If you intend not to supplement your VB projects but to dive into real-world C++ applications, this book should be accompanied with a few other VC++ books, as there will likely be a need to retrieve alternative explanations of various concepts or language features in order to fully understand them. I've found these books to be the best: C++ Primer Plus (Steven Prata; MacMillan), Programming Windows (Charles Petzold; Microsoft), Visual C++ 6.0 Bible (Leinecker and Archer; IDG), and Programming Microsoft Visual C++ (Kruglinski, others; Microsoft).