Monday, 17 June 2013

The C++ Programming Language Fourth Edition

I don't particularly like the copy we get out of Verity Stob over at The Register, however today she brought up a subject I was already going to blog about.

The new edition of the C++ programming language from Mr C++ himself... Bjarne Stroustrup.


I got this for my birthday - yes I'm that sad; or that dedicated to my craft - to request for my birthday large tomes all about the work I do.  I believe I'm a rare thing in the UK software industry for this - least I'm the ONLY developer with my employer who bothers to read and keep my knowledge up to date*.

However, I had other things to finish up reading, so I only just got around to reading the book last night, and in about 20 minutes reading I updated two pieces of knowledge, learned I could port some code I use from a boost header into using the standard functional header and I discovered a new form of constructor chaining.  This was a tiny delve into the book, and really that sums the book up, you can learn something new nearly every other page - even as a seasoned C++ developer I was still updating my knowledge.

I made copious notes of little snippets of code to try and am thoroughly entranced by the elegance of the book.

I'll be blogging more about the snippets I pick up as I go, depending on how important I think they might be for wider use - specifically how I use some of them - like the functional stuff I just mentioned.



* That is, I'm the only person to keep my knowledge up to date without any nefarious alternate reasons - like updating knowledge in an effort to get a different job or fudge an interview for a role on a language I know nothing about - which is something I do observe a lot.

1 comment:

  1. Second printing, July 2013, p.197: in functions 'fp' and 'fr2' wrote ++*p, but must be *p++

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