##. The Topic of This Item

Difficulty: #

A few words about what this Item will cover.

The topic tag and difficulty rating gives you a hint of what you're in for, and typically there are both introductory/review questions (“JG,” a term for a new junior-grade military officer) leading to the main questions (“Guru”). Note that the difficulty rating is my subjective guess at how difficult I expect most people will find each problem, so you might well find that a “7” problem is easier for you than some “5” problem. Since writing Exceptional C++ [Sutter00] and More Exceptional C++ [Sutter02], I've regularly received e-mail saying that “Item #N is easier (or harder) than that!” It's common for different people to vote “easier!” and “harder!” for the same Item. Ratings are personal; any Item's actual difficulty for you depends on your knowledge and experience and could be easier or harder for someone else. In most cases, though, you should find the rating to be a reasonable guide to what to expect.

You might choose to read the whole book front to back; that's great, but you don't have to. You might decide to read all the Items in a section together because you're particularly interested in that section's topic; that's cool too. Except where there are what I call a “miniseries” of related problems which you'll see designated as Part 1, Part 2, and so on, the Items are pretty independent, and you should feel free to jump around, following the many cross-references among the Items in the book, as well as the many references to the first two Exceptional C++ books. The only guidance I'll offer is that the miniseries are designed to be read consecutively as a group; other than that, the choice is yours.

Unless I call something a complete program, it's probably not. Remember that the code examples are usually just snippets or partial programs and aren't expected to compile in isolation. You'll usually have to provide some obvious scaffolding to make a complete program out of the snippet shown.

Finally, a word about URLs: On the web, stuff moves. In particular, stuff I have no control over moves. That makes it a real pain to publish random web URLs in a print book lest they become out of date before the book makes it to the printer, never mind after it's been sitting on your desk for five years. When I reference other peoples' articles or web sites in this book, I do it via a URL on my own web site, www.gotw.ca, which I can control and which contains just a straight redirect to the real web page. Nearly all the other works I reference are listed in the Bibliography, and I've provided an online version with active hyperlinks. If you find that a link printed in this book no longer works, send me e-mail and tell me; I'll update that redirector to point to the new page's location (if I can find the page again) or to say that the page no longer exists (if I can't). Either way, this book's URLs will stay up to date despite the rigors of print media in an Internet world. Whew.

Acknowledgments

My thanks go first and most of all to my wife Tina for her enduring love and support, and to all my family for always being there, during this project and otherwise. Even when I had to “go dark” sometimes to crank out another few articles or edit another few Items, their patience knew no bounds. Without their patience and kindness this book would never have come to exist in its current form.

Our little puppy Frankie offered her own valuable contribution, namely wanting to play—even when I was working, thus forcing me to come up for air every once in a while. Frankie knows nothing whatever about software architecture or programming language design or even code micro-optimizations, but she's exuberantly happy anyway. Hmm.

Many thanks to series editor Bjarne Stroustrup, to editors Peter Gordon and Debbie Lafferty, and to Tyrrell Albaugh, Bernard Gaffney, Curt Johnson, Chanda Leary-Coutu, Charles Leddy, Malinda McCain, Chuti Prasertsith, and the rest of the Addison-Wesley team for their assistance and persistence during this project. It's hard to imagine a better bunch of people to work with, and their enthusiasm and cooperation has helped make this book everything I'd hoped it would become.

There is one other group of people who deserve thanks and credit, namely the many expert reviewers who generously offered their insightful comments and savage criticisms on all or part of this material exactly where needed. Their efforts have made the text you hold in your hands that much more complete, more readable, and more useful than it would otherwise have been. Special thanks for their technical feedback to series editor Bjarne Stroustrup, and to the following people who contributed comments on various parts of this material as it was developed: Dave Abrahams, Steve Adamczyk, Andrei Alexandrescu, Chuck Allison, Matt Austern, Joerg Barfurth, Pete Becker, Brandon Bray, Steve Dewhurst, Jonathan Caves, Peter Dimov, Javier Estrada, Attila Fehér, Marco Dalla Gasperina, Doug Gregor, Mark Hall, Kevlin Henney, Howard Hinnant, Cay Horstmann, Jim Hyslop, Mark E. Kaminsky, Dennis Mancl, Brian McNamara, Scott Meyers, Jeff Peil, John Potter, P. J. Plauger, Martin Sebor, James Slaughter, Nikolai Smirnov, John Spicer, Jan Christiaan van Winkel, Daveed Vandevoorde, and Bill Wade. The remaining errors, omissions, and shameless puns are mine, not theirs.

Herb Sutter
Seattle, May 2004