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C & C++ Code Capsules by Chuck Allison Highly Recommended

ISBN: 0 13 591785 9       Publisher: Prentice Hall       Pages: 570pp       Price: £36-50

Categories:   advanced c++

Reviewed by Francis Glassborow in C Vu 10-5 (Jul 1998)

The author should be well known to regular readers of The C/C++ Users Journal as he is both a consulting editor of that magazine and a regular contributor.

This is a book for those who already program in C++ with a degree of competence. Take this book and open it anywhere and start reading, unless you are up there with the Dan Saks' and Scott Meyers' of this world you will learn something useful. Yes, of course you will be able to criticise, a few more throw specifications might have been nice and you might argue that there is another way of doing some things but my point is that these are expert comments.

A bad book is easy to review in the sense that you do not have to do more than instance a few exemplars of its rottenness and the reader will get the point. No one expects an exhaustive list of all the faults. Good books are much harder to review because the reviewer keeps seeing new things to highlight. You will enjoy the author's interview of Bjarne Stroustrup that kicks the book off. Appendix A includes an almost complete list of keywords (I'll excuse the absence of export, but why did he forget register and for ?). In between there is a wealth of example code and explanations (20 chapters, ranging from 'A Better C' which includes a table listing 73 keywords - only missing the late coming export - 'to Dynamic Memory Management')

Are you serious about C++? Do you think you are already a C++ programmer? If the answer to both questions is 'yes' then I think you should invest some time studying this book. A chapter a week for the next five months should be about right.

At the end of the book the author gives two reading lists, one for C which lists seven books (I think I would add a few more) and The C++ Practitioner's Booklist where he lists eleven titles. I would agree with every one of his choices (and his comments). However I think that I would happily add the current book to make it a round dozen.