Advanced C++

January 12, 2006 @ 0:42 | In Books, Programming | |

Advanced C++, Programming Styles and Idioms
Author: James O. Coplien
Pages: 520
Published: December, 1994

I decided that I had to read this book when Scott Meyers in his More Effective C++ wrote : “.. but when you’ve read it, you’ll never look at C++ the same way again.”

The truth is that I was expecting a very interesting book but the beginning was a little bit disappointed to me. The first chapters of the book are not more that a mere review of topics that a professional c++ programmer would consider as basics (abstract data types, classes, constructor, destructors, inline functions, pointer to member functions, inheritance …). I think that most of this topics are better described in the books: Effective C++, More Effective C++, Exceptional C++ and More Exceptional C++.

I started to enjoy the book when reading chapter 5. There you can read about the Handle - Body Idiom, Virtual Constructors (with an interesting technique of constructing objects on top of one another), Functors…

Undoubtly, the chapter that justify buying this book is the one dedicated to something that Coplien calls Exemplars (something very similar to prorotypes). Exemplars are used to simulate dynamic types in C++ (like smalltalk). The concept itself is interesting but the examples given by the author are not very good (putting in a base class all the methods from classes inheriting is not a good programming technique). Using Exemplars, the author build the Symbolic Canonical Form to emulate the main advantages of languages like Smalltalk: garbage collector and dynamic types. The section dedicated to dynamic reloading of virtual functions is really interesting (obviously, the code used here is non-portable)

Rest of the book (chapter 11 and following) is less interesting: scheduling, threads, exception handling (this topic is outdated)

In conclusion, a book where you can find techniques you though that were impossible in C++. But most of those techniques will have a very little usage in your daily work as a C++ programmer.

Rating: 7 / 10