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    You won't learn anything on little toy programs. You need to write programs that solve actual problems. They don't have to be large, you won't manage to write large programs alone, but they must not be just toys. Commented Jun 8, 2012 at 9:02
  • @JanHudec: What you describe is what I call toy programmes: a piece of code that solves a single problem. So, for example a Runge-Kutta algorithm would be a "toy programme" whereas a full N-body simulation would not be. Commented Jun 8, 2012 at 9:26
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    Those are both "toy programmes". Because the problems are contrived examples of a problem unless you are doing numerical simulations and most programmers don't. Actual problem is something you or somebody you know is going to actually use. It will probably have GUI or at least rather complex command-line parsing and manipulate files or connect to network and use some existing libraries and won't have any non-trivial algorithms, because 99% programs out there don't. Commented Jun 8, 2012 at 9:56
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    @JanHudec are you saying that a person doesn't learn anything by working with small, constrained problems first? If programmers jump directly into large and complicated problems without learning at least some basic principles and some basic language idioms, this is how we end up with these huge "Big Ball of Mud" apps. Commented Jun 8, 2012 at 14:30
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    I'm not sure if this answers the question, but every C++ programmer should read that book (and its sequels.) Commented Aug 30, 2013 at 17:08