Customer Reviews

More Exceptional C++: 40 New Engineering Puzzles, Programming Problems, and Solutions

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book, like the earlier one by Sutter, was a reality check for me. Before I read it, I blissfully believed that I knew C++ really well. After all, I have taught it at the college and corporate level for ten years and programmed commercial code for three. I have also written and published material about the language in several journals. However, these forty exercises really opened my eyes and exercised my brain. They are excellent teaching material, showing you aspects of the language that are subtle, yet critical to know.
One topic that I experienced firsthand is when an exception is thrown out of a constructor. This happened to me many years ago, and I spent hours trying to correct the code so that it finally did something similar to what I wanted. Had I been able to read items 17 and 18 of this book, I could have cut that to about twenty minutes and kept more of my hair.
The problems are all typical of those encountered in the "unusual average" day in the life of a C++ programmer. By that I mean that they may not necessarily reflect the day to day work, but are general enough to most likely crop up on some day for everyone who writes code in C++. The general categories are:

1) Generic programming and the C++ standard library
2) Optimization and Performance
3) Exception safety issues and techniques
4) Inheritance and polymorphism
5) Memory and resource management
6) Free functions and macros
7) Miscellaneous topics

There are many things going on behind the scenes in your C++ programs that most of the time you can ignore. However, when it is a time that you can't, then Sutter is one of the people to consult. His material is always well written and useful in the real world and I recommend this book to all my corporate clients.

Herb sutter's first book worth it's name : it was exceptional. That's why it was a challenge to write an equally good one as a second book. Of course, Herb put a lot of it's main ideas into his first book (like the "swap guts idiom" for example), but it leaves a big room for side subjects.
Topics in this volume are well classified, maybe better than in the first volume. They adress important subjects for the C++ day to day programmer : standard library, performances, exception safety, resource management, etc... The "engineering puzzles" are in fact much less important than the "solution" described bellow. Because each of the solution is not mid game but a practicle piece of work that leads you to a better C++ quality code.
Honestly, this book is not for beginner. It's much more valuable to read a primer book (stroustrup's C++ programing language, or better the Lipman's C++ primer) and then Meyer's effective C++. At least. You also should have a couple of year of C++ practice behind your belt (also at least). It's a top level C++ book, with top level advices and a top level payback for you.
After reading this volume, I have a stong impression that next Sutter's book will stay with such level of quality. Great work, Herb, thank you !
A last word : Maybe you are surprised I've not given 5 stars to this book ? Well I reserve such notation for strongly exceptional book, like the "design patterns". 4 stars still be very good on my own scale.

More Exceptional C++ is every bit as good as the first offering from Sutter. Like the first, this is an advanced text, and a solid working knowledge of C++ is necessary to get the most out of this book.

For those without experience with Sutter's previous book, this is divided into "Items" grouped together by broad subject area. Unless the the items make up a series such as Items 13-16, they can be read independently and in any order. This layout is helpful to the reader who doesn't have a lot of time to read a book from cover to cover. One can sit down and spend 30 minutes with an item and gain valuable insight into the specific subject matter Sutter deals with.

I enjoy the author's writing style because he tends to be more conversational than lecturing. He interjects humor - albeit it geek humor - from time to time. The presentation makes learning advanced techniques, dare I say, fun rather than dry and cumbersome.

It is also worth noting that being advanced doesn't preclude being practical. Sutter deals with everyday topics such as the STL, exception safety, and inheritance. If you are ready to make the step to advanced C++ programmer, this book will guide you on your way in a practical, enjoyable manner.

In this book Herb Sutter continues investigating of the problems that face C++ developers. Even discussions of the problems that one is unlikely to confront reveal important aspects of the proper C++ programming.

The author often beats on a problem until it "has ceased to be ... expired and gone ... bereft of life ... rests in peace" (p. 118). In this particular book, most of the time this is a good thing, because in software development almost everything is a tradeoff, and you don't want to open the gates of hell as a side effect of plugging up a little hole.

I have enjoyed reading this book at least as much as its predecessor, "Exceptional C++". Unfortunately on occasion the author spends too much time discussing trivial implications that appear not to be in line with the complexity of other topics. Also, constant restatement of the parts of every problem statement is quite wasteful and distracting, especially considering the amount of space they occupy (sometimes 25% of the solution space!)

Addison Wesley's "C++ In-Depth Series" is showing an amazing consistency in producing one winner after the other. Any C++ programmer could almost blindly pick up any book in the series and learn some new valuable insights.

I like "More Exceptional C++" even more than the original. It's not clear to me whether this is because the book is better or because the subject matter has become more important to me. The "Exceptional C++" series is shaping up to be a big brother to the "Effective C++" series, covering areas somewhat more advanced than those in the Effective series, such as exceptions, templates, and namespaces.

One aspect of the book I don't particularly care for is the quizzes/points format that, I suspect, is due to the origins of the book in the author's "Guru of the Week" series.

This is a great book and should belong in every advanced C++ programmer's personal library.

I read this book after reading Effective C++ by Scott Meyers. Being able to discuss specific topics rather than viewing a language as a whole was my preferred way of understanding C++, so the books by Sutter and Meyers fit me perfectly.

The main advantage the Exceptional C++ series has over the Meyers series is that you can tell Sutter is the better programmer. You can trust that everything Meyers says is correct but in the end all you really get is some extra pointers on how to do certain things. Sutter on the other hand gets a little deeper on the same topics and makes you feel like can write better C++ code, rather than just being able to format it better.

One complaint I had about Effective C++ by Meyers was that most of the book is text and contains very little code. My experience with reading programming books is that around 90% of plain text will not be retained. The only way verbal programming text will ever stick is if there is good code to accompany it. Since Sutter is a programmer first, author second, he provides more code examples and they seem to be more thought out.

If you have the time then you should probably read from both authors, however, if you don't want to read 4 books then you should probably read the Exceptional series over the Effective series.

If you liked its predecessor, you would do well to snap up this one, too. It's more of the same good stuff, in the same format: Sutter poses a question or series of questions, some of which are fairly general and some of which challenge you to spot mistakes in some code, and then uses it as a springboard to outline some best practices. There is more on exceptions, memory management, inheritance and polymorphism. You'll also discover several ways to get a stack trace and how to write a traits class.

There's also slightly more advanced material on smart pointer members and copy-on-write implementations of strings, which is pretty extensive, particularly with regard to its problems with threading.

This is not a reference book or the sort of volume you'd reach for to solve a specific problem. And Sutter's influence in the field means there's not a huge amount of fundamental stuff that hasn't diffused throughout the C++ literature since this book's publication, but reading the Exceptional C++ series is one of those things you just have to do if you want to call yourself a C++ programmer and there are few better ways to learn The C++ Way than quality time spent with More Exceptional C++.

This book along with the author's previous book are in the must have category for professional C++ Developers. These books along with Scot Meyer's, and Andre Alexandrescu's Modern C++ Programming are the basis for the future of Software Engineering. A must have and must understand.

Mr. Sutter's books biggest strength to my opinion is that they bring together a bunch of original advanced C++ topics that you cannot find anywhere else. This book has its share of very original content but I feel like the ratio original content vs topics that you can find in other books is lower in this book than with the other books of the serie. The most interesting section in this book in my opinion is the one on exception safety and the less original section is the one on generic programming and STL as you can find much of the information contained in this section in other books such as Effective STL from Scott Meyer or C++ Template from David Vandervoorde and Nicolai M. Josuttis.

Herb Sutter is a genius. He can boil down C++ to any users level.

You will learn more about C++ than you thought you'd need.

Easy to understand, easy to read, easy to implement.