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

Herb Sutter may well know the C++ programming language better than anyone else. He's worked with the language for years; he sits on its international standards committee; he works on the Microsoft Visual C++ team--his list of qualifications is astounding. That is, however, only part of the reason you should pay attention to Exceptional C++ Style. A more important reason is that he understands how to teach software developers: To wit, he issues challenges and dares the programmers to figure them out. Sutter grasps the importance of not lecturing smart people, and knows that guided exploration goes a very long way.

To give an example of Sutter's challenges (40 of them, graded by difficulty, appear in this dense book) would take more space than is available here. Know, however, that while some of them deal with obscure parts of C++, most do not, and the majority of the challenges deal with aspects of the language you use all the time. Sutter's approach doesn't consist exclusively of challenges and solutions, either--the author takes time to distill the exercises into design recommendations, making it easy for programmers to remind themselves of what they've learned. --David Wall

Topics covered: How to take a journeyman's skill with C++ and turn it into something more masterly, by exploring the behavior of C++ and its various parts in detail. Coverage deals with inheritance and other aspects of object orientation, exception handling, memory management, and templating.