Product Description

Software "style" is about finding the perfect balance between overhead and functionality... elegance and maintainability... flexibility and excess. In Exceptional C++ Style, legendary C++ guru Herb Sutter presents 40 new programming scenarios designed to analyze not only the what but the why and help you find just the right balance in your software.

Organized around practical problems and solutions, this book offers new insight into crucial C++ details and interrelationships, and new strategies for today's key C++ programming techniques--including generic programming, STL, exception safety, and more. You'll find answers to questions like:

• What can you learn about library design from the STL itself?
• How do you avoid making templated code needlessly non-generic?
• Why shouldn't you specialize function templates? What should you do instead?
• How does exception safety go beyond try and catch statements?
• Should you use exception specifications, or not?
• When and how should you "leak" the private parts of a class?
• How do you make classes safer for versioning?
• What's the real memory cost of using standard containers?
• How can using const really optimize your code?
• How does writing inline affect performance?
• When does code that looks wrong actually compile and run perfectly, and why should you care?
• What's wrong with the design of std::string?

Exceptional C++ Style will help you design, architect, and code with style--and achieve greater robustness and performance in all your C++ software.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #209218 in Books
• Published on: 2004-08-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

From the Back Cover

Software "style" is about finding the perfect balance between overhead and functionality... elegance and maintainability... flexibility and excess. In Exceptional C++ Style, legendary C++ guru Herb Sutter presents 40 new programming scenarios designed to analyze not only the what but the why and help you find just the right balance in your software.

Organized around practical problems and solutions, this book offers new insight into crucial C++ details and interrelationships, and new strategies for today's key C++ programming techniques--including generic programming, STL, exception safety, and more. You'll find answers to questions like:

• What can you learn about library design from the STL itself?
• How do you avoid making templated code needlessly non-generic?
• Why shouldn't you specialize function templates? What should you do instead?
• How does exception safety go beyond try and catch statements?
• Should you use exception specifications, or not?
• When and how should you "leak" the private parts of a class?
• How do you make classes safer for versioning?
• What's the real memory cost of using standard containers?
• How can using const really optimize your code?
• How does writing inline affect performance?
• When does code that looks wrong actually compile and run perfectly, and why should you care?
• What's wrong with the design of std::string?

Exceptional C++ Style will help you design, architect, and code with style--and achieve greater robustness and performance in all your C++ software.

About the Author

Herb Sutter is the author of three highly acclaimed books, Exceptional C++ Style, Exceptional C++, and More Exceptional C++ (Addison-Wesley). He chairs the ISO C++ standards committee, and is contributing editor and columnist for C/C++ Users Journal. As a software architect for Microsoft, Sutter leads the design of C++ language extensions for .NET programming.

Customer Reviews

ever so slightly less exceptional than before
I had mixed feelings on this one. On the one hand, this is definitely a good book. You won't find a lot of the material here having filtered out to any other book yet. On the other hand, the actual content itself feels more ephemeral than the previous two installments. Personally, I don't have a problem with that; Sutter's work can be read perfectly well as a way to pick up the general principles of solid C++ engineering from an articulate, reliable expert, you don't need him to be spelling out everyday techniques to get something useful from his writing.

As an example, the items that I found most memorable included his investigation of how compilers failed to adhere to the standard when it comes to template friend function look up, with the surprising result that the normally reliable g++ is the worst offender. Additionally, he demonstrates several ways to call private member functions from outside of a class. I'm certain that fans of the last two books will get a kick out of this stuff, but it's not quite at the same level as his work designing for exception safety.

In addition to the usual question-essay-guideline format, the book has a substantial final section dissecting some failings of publicly-available code, which is where I assume the title of the book comes from. Those with fond memories of Tom Cargill's C++ Programming Style will definitely like this bit.

Despite the fact that the material is arguably slightly thinner than usual, the number of pages is actually up on the previous books. Sutter's writing style has also expanded. However, in a couple of places, the writing could have done with some editing. There are some witty asides and extraneous material that take up just a bit too much space.

Nonetheless, Sutter-nutters will probably not be too disappointed by Exceptional C++ Style. I still really enjoyed this book; reading it was time well spent.