Customer Reviews

The C++ Standard: Incorporating Technical Corrigendum No.1

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I'm not going to review the content; if you know what this is (the formal standard for the C++ programming language) you know that standards are written in dense, formal language, but that at times, no other source of information about the language will do; this is the primary source. If you claim to be an expert on C++ and write a lot of code, eventually you will probably have to look something up in the standard.

But after looking at a copy close up, I no longer want to purchase it. Why?

While the paper is acid-free and reasonably thick, the binding is one of the poorest I've ever seen in a hardback book.

I'm not an expert on book-binding, but most of the hardcover books in my professional library (such as Refactoring, Design Patterns, The C++ Programming Language Special Edition, and various other books from Addison-Wesley and other vendors) have a sturdy strip of cloth embedded in the binding and are strongly glued in place.

This book, by comparison, had a thin cover, no cloth in the binding, and flimsy gluing; just flipping through some pages, I was afraid the pages were going to start falling out. A second copy had the same flimsy binding.

For $65.00 we deserve better. Even a solid paperback at this price would have been much more appealing. Steele's Common Lisp: the Language, 2nd edition is a thousand-page paperback, and much, much sturdier. Note to Wiley: just sell a fat paper binding for $50 and leave it at that, charge a few dollars more if you must and give us a book that will last a few years. Don't try to con us with an expensive hardcover which is in reality flimsier than any other programming book on my shelves!

I agree with the earlier reviewer and I'll add another reason: For $18.00 you can buy an electronic version of the Standard from ANSI as a PDF file. Same content (except the TR which I think is available separately) and no issues about binding. It won't feel like a book but somehow I doubt that Programming Language Standards are read at bedtime with a cup of cocoa at hand...

As an OS kernel and networking programmer recently cast into the world of C++ applications design, I need a definitive work that tells me exactly what the C++ mechanisms do and what behavior I can rely on from the standards, and that's just what this provides. Although each platform and compiler differ, and there are always bugs and warts to work around, it's crucial to understand what the boundaries are and what behaviors you can (and can't) rely on to write robust applications.

If you need to know how placement-new works and the requirements for constructors and destructors and try/catch blocks, then this is the book you want. If you need to know common idioms and higher-level structures, you'll need a different reference.

For what I intended to do (debug some squirrelly problems and obscure valgrind warnings), it was precisely the book I needed. It's a little pricey, but that's (unfortunately) what many of these international standards, other than those from the IETF, are like.