C++ Templates: The Complete Guide [Hardcover]

David Vandevoorde (Author), Nicolai M. Josuttis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 22, 2002 | ISBN-10: 0201734842 | ISBN-13: 978-0201734843 | Edition: 1

This book will be the next C++ classic. Although templates have been part of C++ for well over a decade, they still lead to misunderstanding, misuse, and controversy. At the same time, they are increasingly found to be powerful instruments for the development of cleaner, faster, and smarter software. This has made templates one of the hottest topics in the C++ community. This book will be both a complete reference as well as a tutorial. It will emphasize the practical use of templates, and will include real-world examples. Every working C++ programmer will need a copy of this book for his or her library.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Templates are among the most powerful features of C++, but they are too often neglected, misunderstood, and misused. C++ Templates: The Complete Guide provides software architects and engineers with a clear understanding of why, when, and how to use templates to build and maintain cleaner, faster, and smarter software more efficiently.

C++ Templates begins with an insightful tutorial on basic concepts and language features. The remainder of the book serves as a comprehensive reference, focusing first on language details, then on a wide range of coding techniques, and finally on advanced applications for templates. Examples used throughout the book illustrate abstract concepts and demonstrate best practices.

Readers learn

• The exact behaviors of templates
• How to avoid the pitfalls associated with templates
• Idioms and techniques, from the basic to the previously undocumented
• How to reuse source code without threatening performance or safety
• How to increase the efficiency of C++ programs
• How to produce more flexible and maintainable software

This practical guide shows programmers how to exploit the full power of the template features in C++.

The companion Web site at http://www.josuttis.com/tmplbook/ contains sample code and additional updates.

0201734842B09172002

About the Author

David Vandevoorde is an engineer at the Edison Design Group. He is an active member of the ANSI C++ Standards Committee, and a cofounder of the newsgroup comp.lang.c++.moderated. A graduate of the Brussels Free University and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, his interests include algorithm development, programming languages, and teaching. See www.vandevoorde.com.

Nicolai M. Josuttis is an independent technical consultant who designs object-oriented software for the telecommunications, traffic, finance, and manufacturing industries. He is an active member of the C++ Standards Committee Library Working Group. Nicolai has written several books on object-oriented programming and C++. See www.josuttis.com.

0201734842AB09172002

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 552 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 1 edition (November 22, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201734842
• ISBN-13: 978-0201734843
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #222,599 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 36 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Comprehensive and Thorough January 1, 2003

By "microtherion"

Format:Hardcover

This is a book that the C++ community has been in need of for several years, and it seems that an ideal team of authors has come together for this: Nicolai Josuttis again contributes the thoroughness and lucid writing that has made his earlier book _The C++ Standard Library_ such a pleasure to read, and David Vandevoorde contributes historical background about the evolution of C++ standard and its implementations that help to understand some of the peculiarities of how C++ works today and some of the directions it's likely to evolve in.

The book is divided into 4 parts. Part I gives a basic overview of the template mechanisms in C++ and part II goes into more detail on this. Part III applies templates to standard problems, while part IV covers more exotic uses of templates similar to what is discussed in Alexandrescu's _Modern C++ Design_. Even for a reasonably experienced template user like me, there were many details I learned even from the most fundamental part I.

This is a near perfect book (apart from a few apparent bugs in the code examples that hopefully will get corrected) that will greatly benefit any programmer who works with template based code.

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Nice, but may not be a good first choice. December 27, 2004

By Dave O'Hearn

Format:Hardcover

This book is encyclopedic. It will tell you everything about templates, both every detail at the language level and everything interesting someone has done with templates in the last 10 years. It even tells you furture changes that might happen to templates in 4-8 years when the C++ standard is revised. This last is useful to know, to keep in mind what templates cannot do, as sometimes it feels like templates can do anything. Though the writing is somewhat dry, it is always clean and to-the-point, and the authors have the highest reputations for accuracy and expertise.

The entire last 200 pages of this 500 page book, from Metaprograms on through the entire section on Advanced Applications, describe things software developers should look to libraries for. Smart pointers, generic functors, metaprogramming, etc., are all weak without a supporting library, and there are good libraries freely available. The book gives references to them, which is good, but it mainly tells you how to write similar things from scratch, which is somewhat useless except to the few hundred living people who write the libraries. Unless you were curious, that is.

The only technique I will be using myself in production code, as opposed to getting from quality libraries, is traits and policies. The book does spend 40 pages covering this, and it touches all the bases, but _Modern C++ Design_ has a much fuller coverage, which this book admits at the end of its section.

Although this book is excellent, and you will eventually want it to reach "guru" status as your understanding of templates grows, you may want _Modern C++ Design_ first, if your present interest is mainly in policy-based design and you prefer to start with applications rather than fundamentals. You may also want to consider the new _C++ Template Metaprogramming_ if your present interest is metaprogramming. But if you are looking for a solid, general grounding in everything templates can do and have been used to do, _C++ Templates: the Complete Guide_ is exactly what you are looking for.

60 of 67 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll fall down... November 26, 2002

By Hyman Rosen

Format:Hardcover

Templates are increasingly becoming one of the most important
aspects of C++ programming, and are the central feature of the
most creative and innovative new C++ projects.

They are reasonably simple in concept, but in the effort to make
them behave "intuitively" for common cases, the actual rules that
describe what they do are hideously complicated. A guide for the
perplexed was sorely needed, and fortunately, has now appeared.

I'm no slouch at the subject myself, but I learned a few things
that I had no inkling of before, just on a casual reading of the
first few chapters. (Although the main thing I am learning once
again is just how insanely stupid C++ syntax is, and how awful
was the choice of angle brackets for template delimiters.) The
authors are experts on the subject, and the material is presented
clearly, with many examples, and above all correctly.

This is another must-have book for people who want to understand
all of C++. (Not that that's possible, except for perhaps half a
dozen people or so. I'll bet more people understand General
Relativity.)