Roberts E. Programming Abstraction in C++

Stanford: Spring, 2012. — 975 p.This text represents a major revision of the course reader that we’ve been using at Stanford for the last several years. The primary goal of the revision was to bring the approach more closely in line with the way C++ is used in industry, which will in turn make it easier to export Stanford’s approach to teaching data structures to a larger fraction of schools. Even though this quarter’s draft is reasonably complete, the text remains somewhat rough. In particular, these chapters have not yet had the benefit of the wonderful copyediting service that my wife Lauren Rusk has provided for all my books.
This textbook has had an interesting evolutionary history that in some ways mirrors the genesis of the C++ language itself. Just as Bjarne Stroustrup’s first version of C++ was implemented on top of a C language base, this reader began its life as my textbook Programming Abstractions in C (Addison-Wesley, 1998). In 2002-03, Julie Zelenski updated it for use with the C++ programming language, which we began using in CS106 B and CS106 X during that year. Although the revised text worked fairly well at the outset, CS106 B and CS106 X have evolved in
recent years so that their structure no longer tracks the organization of the book. In 2009, I embarked on a comprehensive process of rewriting the book so that students in these courses can use it as both a tutorial and a reference. As always, that process takes a considerable amount of time, and there are almost certainly some sections of the book that need a substantial rewrite.