ACCU Reviews: Industrial Strength C++ Rules & Recommendations

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Book Review

Industrial Strength C++ Rules & Recommendations by Henricson & Nyquist
Highly Recommended

ISBN: 0 13 120965 5 Publisher: Prentice Hall Pages: 215pp Price: £24-99

Categories: advanced c++ beginner's c++

Reviewed by Francis Glassborow in C Vu 9-6 (Sep 1997)

I must apologise to my readers and the authors for the lateness of this review. I only recently discovered that while Prentice Hall was sending me all potentially relevant titles from their trade list they were not sending me ones from their academic one. In the case of this book this is doubly unfortunate because only books in the Trade list get regularly displayed by retailers.

This book is about coding style for C++. As such it should be on the reading list of every professional C++ programmer, and it would serve as a good basis for a coding standard for your programming group. Having said that, I should add that some of you will be familiar with the contents because the authors developed for the 'Ellemtel' public domain coding standard.

The book is divided into 15 chapters, two appendices and a summary of the rules and recommendations. Within each chapter closely related R&Rs are grouped before being expanded with explanation and examples. Let me pull some text from Chapter 1 (Naming). The first block of R&R:

Rec. 1.1 Use meaningful names
Rec. 1.2 Use English names for identifiers
Rec. 1.3 Be consistent when naming functions, types, variables, and constants.

They expand 1.1 with: Classes, typedefs, functions, variables, namespaces, and files are all given names. Suitable names are meaningful to the person using the abstractions provided, and do not change if

The implementation changes.
A program is ported to another environment.
Source code is used in a new context.

Abbreviations are not always meaningful and can be difficult to understand. It is best to avoid abbreviations as much as possible. Use only commonly accepted abbreviations (such as IBM). When elaborating on the second recommendation they advise that using words from your native language (if it is not English) may be unhelpful to someone speaking some other language. They give the example of the Swedish word for car (bil) and ask if you know what that means to a Japanese programmer. Of course hidden in this is the recognition that code reuse extends across national boundaries.

Many will not agree with all the authors' recommendations but that should not deter you from reading this book. Whatever your level of programming if you want to be a serious C++ user you should read this book and annotate the places where you do not agree, adding your own alternative recommendation with rationale. Such would make excellent material for publication in C Vu or Overload. I would be very happy to run a regular feature where members quoted one of the recommendations from this book, explained why they disagreed and presented their alternative. Sometimes you might want to strengthen a recommendation, sometimes weaken it and sometimes change it completely. There may be extras that you want to add. That would be fine, just point to the chapter you think they belong in.

Last Update - 13 May 2001.

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