Effective C++: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your Programs and Design (2nd Edition) (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series)
by Scott Meyers
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Book Reviews of Effective C++: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your Programs and Design (2nd Edition) (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series)
Book Review: 50 gems every good C++ programmer should know by heart
Summary: 4 Stars
The subtitle of the book '50 specific ways to improve your programs and designs' is a pretty good summary of what this book is all about. It's is very well structured, the table of contents summarizes each point in one sentence, together with the extensive and complete index it's very easy to use as a quick reference. But thanks to Meyers clear and oftentimes amusing style of writing it's also a joy to read from cover to cover. You'd be a fool if you didn't anyways, since you'd miss out on lots of excellent source code examples and very well stated arguments for each of the tips. Some of the tips may seem obvious, like item 5 which reads: "use the same form in corresponding uses of new and delete". Others like item 1: "prefer const and inline to #define" might seem pretty alien to seasoned C programmers/preprocessor magicians or performance freaks. After reading the author's arguments for his points you'll have a hard time defending your position, though (in the unlikely case that you are still not convinced, that is). Meyers does explicitly encourage critical thinking over blind following of the rules though, and in the tradition of Donald Knuth has promised a reward for every error discovered in his work.
How universally accepted these tips have become you can guess form reading the C++ newsgroups or noticing that they have been fully integrated into automatic source checking tools such as gimpel's PC-Lint. Professional programmers should know these 50 gems by heart - buy the book!
Book Review: Effective and Essential C++ Reading
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is well written. Meyers explains many C++ details that are either badly explained or not explained at all in other books. His focus is always on productive and practical techniques and he doesn't sit on the fence: he gives you the benefit of clearly well thought out advice. If you want to understand C++ better and if you want to understand the design trade offs, for example, between inheritance, aggregation, and templates, this is a good place to look for help. This is one of those rare books that you will want to read more than once---as well as to refer to regularly. Highly recommended.Book Review: THE Coding Standards
Summary: 5 Stars
Quite simply, you shouldn't be programming if you haven't read this, and the two other books in the "Effective..." series. Meyers is a complete guru when it comes to coding (even the GNU GCC compiler writers seem to agree - check the available settings, one of them is specific to Meyers' works). What makes Meyers stand out from the crowd, however, is that he is extraordinarily readable. Often witty, but always getting his point across, these books are fine to be read anywhere, rather than simply as a reference manual like many other "bibles" are suited to. My only criticisms are that a: sometimes his attempts at wit can come across as ever so slightly patronising, and b: really Effective C++ and More Effective C++ should have been combined into one book for the price that these are charged at, and c: he has really, really, REALLY bad hair, and the photo on the back makes me groan with sympathy. These minor grumps aside, these are the best books on coding practice you will get, and every single coder out there that thinks he knows his stuff should buy these just to be shown how wrong they in fact are. Superb.Book Review: Good but too expensive ( Thinking in C++)
Summary: 2 Stars
People who say this book is great, are those who haven't read or heard of " Thinking in C++ " by Bruce Eckel. There are two volumes in that book I and II. I will say Effective C++ is a good book, but definitely not worth its price. Thinking in C++ is free ( can't believe it ). Download it for yourself and read both volumes. If you really want to spend money, they I would suggest " More Effective C++: 35 New ways " is something you should buy. That's exactly what I did. I have both volumes of Thinking in C++ and the 35 new ways book. That serves the purpose. You will thank me later on. I have over 5 years of experience in C++ with a BS, MS in Computer Science. Once again go download Thinking in C++.I loved it.Book Review: Brought forward to 2005
Summary: 5 Stars
There is a reason why this book is in it's third edition. It's been great since the first edition. This latest edition is a complete update for the needs of the modern C++ programmer, including all of the newer elements of the STL, and commonly used extensions like Boost.
The addition of color in this edition is an excellent idea. The color quickly draws your attention to the portions of the code that are important to the narrative. It's something that I wish were in more technical books. All too often the important elements of the code are obscured in all of the infrastructure code which isn't critical to the technology being discussed.
A must own for any C++ programmer. And definitely worth the look if you have the first or second editions and are still actively programming C++.