C++, although a marvelous language, isn't perfect. Matthew Wilson has been working with it for over a decade, and during that time he has found inherent limitations that require skillful workarounds. In this book, he doesn't just tell you what's wrong with C++, but offers practical techniques and tools for writing code that's more robust, flexible, efficient, and maintainable. He shows you how to tame C++'s complexity, cut through its vast array of paradigms, take back control over your code-and get far better results.
If you're a long-time C++ developer, this book will help you see your programming challenges in new ways-and illuminate powerful techniques you may never have tried. If you're newer to C++, you'll learn principles that will make you more effective in all of your projects. Along the way, you'll learn how to:
- Overcome deficiencies in C++'s type system
- Enforce software design through constraints, contracts, and assertions
- Handle behavior ignored by the standard- including issues related to dynamic libraries, static objects, and threading
- Achieve binary compatibility between dynamically loading components
- Understand the costs and disadvantages of implicit conversions-and the alternatives
- Increase compatibility with diverse compilers, libraries, and operating environments
- Help your compiler detect more errors and work more effectively
- Understand the aspects of style that impact reliability
- Apply the Resource Acquisition Is Initialization mechanism to a wide variety of problem domains
- Manage the sometimes arcane relationship between arrays and pointers
- Use template programming to improve flexibility and robustness
- Extend C++: including fast string concatenation, a true NULL-pointer, flexible memory buffers, Properties, multidimensional arrays, and Ranges
The CD-ROM contains a valuable variety of C++ compilers, libraries, test programs, tools, and utilities, as well as the author's related journal articles. New and updated imperfections, along with software libraries and example code are available online at http://imperfectcplusplus.com.