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Book Review
Effective C++ by Scott Meyers
Highly Recommended
ISBN: 0 201 56364 9       Publisher: Addison-Wesley       Pages: 205pp       Price: £19-95.
Categories:   advanced c++    
Reviewed by Francis Glassborow in C Vu 4-4 (May 1992)
This is not a book to teach you how to program in C++. It is aimed at the proficient programmer who has recently learnt to program in C++. It consists of fifty items batched in groups. Each item deals with a single aspect of C++ that may be a point of style, a common misunderstanding or something that confuses. The aim is to take you on from the stage that you might have reached after a one week course to being a reasonably knowledgeable user.

The first chapter - Shifting from C to C++ - contains four items:

Use const and inline instead of #define
Prefer iostream.h to stdio.h
Use new and delete instead of malloc and free
Prefer C++ style comment
In each case Scott goes into quite a lot of detail to explain the what and why of the rule so that the reader can adopt it from understanding rather than by rote. Adoption through understanding will also result in the reader knowing when to ignore the rule.

I thoroughly recommend this book. It would be nice to see some of our training establishments adopt it as an end of course gift to those who have successfully completed in introduction to C++ for C programmers. The cost could easily be absorbed into most course fees and students would go away with some practical reading to improve their use of C++.

Other Authors with the same surname

Meyers
Effective C++ 2ed by Scott Meyers [Recommended]  (Reviewed May 1998)
More Effective C++ by Scott Meyers [Highly Recommended]  (Reviewed May 1996)

Last Update - 13 May 2001.

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