More Effective C++


Review comments by Marc

Great book, full of useful advices on issues relevant to our design. Explains state-of-the art techniques that we should use. Good examples, with running code (I downloaded and installed for our compiler the reference counted string stuff from Item 29), and downloaded the updated auto_ptr source).

Erratas are available (I printed them and joined the listing to one of our copies).

I specially recommend the use of reference counted pointers in conjunction with STL (with conversions based on inheritance between the template argument types). This is thus a construction built upon several distinct items in the book. I wonder why Meyers did not make this synthesis himself.

I'd wish to stress the importance of item 33. In my opinion, one needs to use virtual inheritance in addition. This is actually a matter of implementing item 32, and supporting future users of the abstract classes, who will end up inheriting them multiply, yet wish to implement the virtual members only once.


Info

from Computer Literacy Bookshops:

This is the long awaited follow up to _Effective C++_, and like its predecessor, _More Effective C++_ is a terse, precise list of explanations of things to make your C++ programs ... well, more effective. Scott Meyers, a recognized authority on C++, has organized "the 35 new ways" into six major sections: the Basics (includes handy things to remember like "Never treat arrays polymorphically"); the Operators "Understand the different meanings of 'new' and 'delete'; the Exceptions "Prevent resource leaks in constructors"; Efficiency "Understand the cost of virtual functions, multiple inheritance, virtual base classes and RTTI"; Techniques "Proxy classes"; and Miscellany "Make non-leaf classes abstract". Meyers also includes an incredibly helpful recommended reading section -- excellent comments on each item are also mentioned here.


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Last modified: Tue Sep 21 13:48:27 EETDST 1999