C++ Programming Style Preface

Almost two decades after the publication of Kernighan and Plauger's classic, 
The Elements of Programming Style, its compact set of rules remains the best 
general guidance on good programming. Today, however, our programs are larger 
and our programming languages have changed. We now care as much about how the 
components of a program fit together as we do about the algorithms and data 
structures used in each component. DeRemer and Kron coined the terms 
programming-in-the-large and programming-in-the-small to make a distinction 
between the large-scale and small-scale aspects of programs. By 
programming-in-the-small, they meant dealing with components of a program 
that are one to a few pages long - the size of a typical C++ class. By 
programming-in-the-large, they meant the structuring of in-the-small 
components into a program - in C++ terms, dealing with relationships between 
classes. Kernighan and Plauger concentrated their work on the issues of 
programming-in-the-small. Their advice about programming-in-the-large is 
sound, but minimal

Modularize. Use subroutines.

This book addresses programming style, with more emphasis on 
programming-in-the-large, and is restricted to the domain of C++ programs. It 
is written for the programmer who has learned the mechanics of C++, but is 
experiencing difficulty in applying the language features - particularly the 
object-oriented features - to programming problems. Though the discussion is 
limited to C++, many of the observations about programming are true of other 
languages. I leave the treatment of language-independent style in-the-large 
to more ambitious authors.

I have adopted Kernighan and Plauger's method of distilling rules of 
programming style from the critical reading and rewriting of programs. All 
the programs used here are taken from textbooks, magazine articles and 
tutorials on C++ programming. None was created artificially for this work. 
Some programs are presented exactly as originally published, while others 
have been altered cosmetically. The alterations range from the correction of 
in-the-small bugs, which would only distract, to structure-preserving 
transformations of programs for which copyright was not obtained.

The spirit in which to approach the material is that of an egoless code 
review. We all learn by reading and reviewing each other's programs. The 
material is not a criticism of individual programmers - it seeks only to 
differentiate between good and bad programs. No doubt the programs that are 
presented here as better versions have their own shortcomings. The reader 
is encouraged to examine these programs critically, looking for further 
improvements in programming style.