This is the sequel to Scott Meyers' classic "Effective C++". When it came out (in 1996) "More Effective C++" complemented the material in "Effective C++" very well. Since then, "Effective C++" has been fully updated (3rd ed., 2005), therefore the two books are, strictly speaking, no longer complementary. Since its first publication, "More Effective C++" has only been changed in minor ways, mainly through the addition of footnotes (some of which go against the advice in the main text, see Items 14, 18, 20, & 26).
The Good: as in his earlier volume, Meyers' writing is easygoing and occasionally funny, e.g. "If BookEntry's constructor throws an exception, pb will be the null pointer, so deleting it in the catch block does nothing except make you feel better about yourself." (Item 10). Despite the overlap with other books noted above (and below), some of the material is both important and not covered elsewhere, especially the stuff on proxy classes and efficiency. In the case of the latter, I really appreciated the table in Item 24 discussing the costs of virtual functions, multiple inheritance, virtual base classes, and RTTI. In a number of places, Meyers elucidates the established terminology of the C++ community. For example, the "return value optimization" you may have heard of amounts to returning constructor arguments instead of objects (Item 20). A notable exception to this terminological clarity is RAII: though he explains the concept, he does not mention the term itself. In typical "tips & tricks" fashion, Meyers presents a large number of useful tidbits of information, a few of which I mention below. Some of these are more or less obvious, but others are less straightforward: a) a sequence of conversions cannot contain more than one user-defined conversion (Item 5), b) postfix increment/decrement operators take an int argument (Item 6), c) passing a temporary object to a non-const reference parameter is not allowed for function calls, but it is for exceptions (Item 12), and d) creating a class template where the type template parameter apparently is never used can help you get separate copies of the static members when the template is instantiated for different types (Item 26).
The Bad: in my opinion, after reading a detailed introductory book the main three things a C++ programmer needs practice with and further instruction on are: a) condensed lore on object-oriented programming, including design idioms and patterns, b) templates, encompassing template metaprogramming, and c) the Standard Template Library, meaning its containers, iterators, and algorithms. (With the coming of the new standard I guess one should add multithreading to this list). The problem is, this book was published in 1996, when all three of these concepts were new(ish) (e.g. Meyers discusses Singleton but he doesn't call it that) so they do not get the treatment they deserve here. Today, Meyers' own "Effective C++, 3rd edition" (2005) does a fine job of discussing templates in more detail as well as introducing a few design patterns. Even more information on these subjects, broken down into bite-sized chunks, can be found in Steve Dewhurst's "C++ Common Knowledge" (2005) and Herb Sutter's "Exceptional C++" (2000). Finally, Meyers' own "Effective STL" contains advice on the STL that is considerably broader and more detailed than what is included in the present tome. The book's time-dependence is obvious in other ways, too, ranging from trivial matters (e.g. in Item 28 the two classes derived from MusicProduct are CD and... Cassette), to topics that are now irrelevant at best (e.g. what to do if your compiler doesn't support new-style casts or the explicit keyword), and even including fundamental issues (e.g. so much attention to auto_ptr seems misplaced today, when we have access to things like shared_ptr and unique_ptr). Finally, in contradistinction to "Effective C++", most Items in "More Effective C++" do not end with a "Summary" section. Given that they are also longer, this interferes with the reader's ability to quickly bring to mind each Item's lessons.
In a nutshell, I believe that this book is no longer the best "third book" on C++ (the first one being a solid introduction like the "C++ Primer" and the second one being none other than "Effective C++, 3rd edition"). It looks like the niche that this book filled when it came out has been taken over by more recent volumes, including Meyers' other works. With C++0x on the horizon and the barrage of new editions about to appear, this will only become more so. However, Meyers' writing is very good and his advice is authoritative, so I definitely did not regret reading this volume.
Alex Gezerlis
ISBN-13: 978-0201633719
ISBN-10: 020163371X
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Scott Meyers' take on how to use C++ successfully.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 21, 2018
