Other reviews mentioned that this is not a book for advanced people. That's true. It was very helpful to me, however. I did some C++ and application development in high school, but put it away and didn't think about it much. Now when it came time to perform a computationally-intensive simulation, I found myself with pretty vague knowledge of C++, and how it actually works. This book was exactly at the right level for me. It's a bridge between beginner and intermediate/advanced. Lots of good practical knowledge. Professional yet comprehensible writing style.