if you want to get confused by a trillion optimizations in the parts where understanding is the most important, by all means get this book.Lamothe is still stuck in the mid-70's C days. He claims C++ is "hard to teach in" because it is confusing. I think it is more confusing to him than to any modern programmer. Old C is by far more confusing in my opinion.This book is 1700 pages long - a big chunk of it is almost pure code dump, that could easily fit on a CD (and does). The old-fashioned programming style, combined with his optimizations down to the assembler level makes the code hard to understand. I believe it is time for Lamothe to enter the 21st century with his programming style, and get out of the 70's.