Think Like a Programmer: An Introduction to Creative Problem Solving  
$34.95, 256 pages, 2012
By V. Anton Spraul
No Starch Press
ISBN 13: 978-1593274245

This book bills itself as an introduction to creative problem solving and it starts off on the right track. Using a few interesting logical puzzles such as the “fox, goose, and corn crossing the river” puzzle and an alien combination lock puzzle invented by the author, it explains some useful problem solving techniques such as breaking a problem into manageable pieces, looking for analogies to previously solved problems, and attacking the easiest parts of a problem first.

Unfortunately the author is sometimes rather pedantic, beating a topic into the ground long after it has lost all interest. The book also spends a lot of time on programming-specific topics that aren’t really creative problem solving. For example, the book spends six pages explaining what arrays are and how they work, eight pages on string manipulations, and whole sections on basic data structure topics such as linked lists. These are important topics but they really aren’t creative problem solving.

These topics also require a fair amount of C++-specific syntax and manipulation. For example, the sections on string manipulation don’t make any sense in languages such as C#, Java, or Visual Basic that treat a string as an entity instead of as a series of bytes. You can still read the text and try to pull out the deeper concepts but they are obscured by the C++ orientation. The book might have been improved by using pseudo-code for everything and focusing only on problem solving tricks and techniques, but perhaps the author wanted to use C++ so readers could write concrete, testable programs.

This might be a good second book for a beginning C++ programmer, but more experienced programmers will be familiar with most of the topics covered in this book and programmers using other languages will need to make some mental adjustments to convert the C++ examples into a more familiar form.