More Effective C++: 35 New Ways to Improve Your Programs and Designs 1st Edition

While Meyers' first book, _Effective C++_, described fundamental concepts of C++, this book covers substantially more advanced techniques. These are not the heavily-designed strategies described in _Design Patterns_ or _Advanced C++: Programming Styles and Idioms_, but more lightweight and fundamental C++ features, including the specifics of memory allocation, exception handling, stack-based classes, and operator overloading. These are features of C++ which can be ignored at first but soon become key everday programming elements and important design considerations once well understood.
The material covered here separates the casual or novice C++ hobbyist from the true programmer.

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

Yeah, Effective C++ is really a *must read* if you want to improve your current knowledge of C++. However, although interesting, I don't find this book a must because it explains things you will not probably use in your real life as a programmer. If you already have Effective C++, both Stroustup, and/or Coplien's "Advanced C++ Programming Styles and Idioms" and/or Murray's "C++ Strategies and Tactics", I don't think you should get it unless you do not sleep at nights or you want to know absolutely everything about C++. However, it is a good book, so if you are not concerned about money, get it and read it, but get first the other ones I said.

...this book is for you. Both "50 Specific Ways" and his second book "35 New Ways" have helped me bring my C++ programming up to the next level of understanding. After using C for more than 10 years and C++ for all but the first few of those years, there were still many small things that used to bug me. Problems with some of my constructors, strange constructs I'd discovered over the years but never 100% understood... Scott's books have not only cleared the field, but have brought to my attention many new things about objects and C++ I'd never previously considered.
One warning: I found that some items were too far above me when I first read through the books -- especially this second book, "35 New Ways..." However, once I'd finished reading the book, I started again right back at page 1, and my second (and 3rd, 4th...) reading made much more sense. There is a *lot* of helpful information packed into Scott's 85 items.
I recommend picking up both books at once, or, I believe a special edition is available with both books condensed into 1 volume.

This book is supposed to be an extension of Effective C++(Effective C++: 55 Specific Ways to Improve Your Programs and Designs (3rd Edition)). However, the most recent edition of Effective C++ is 10 years more modern (1995-2005). Effective C++ already covers a lot of More Effective C++, and with more current details. Additionally, More Effective C++'s comments on efficiency may no longer be as relevant with advances in compilers and computer architectures.

Just a warning. The book is by no means a waste of time, but perhaps your time is better spent finding another resource, providing you already read Effective C++.