Summary
The C++ Cookbook, which I cowrote with Ryan Stephens, Jonathan Turkanis, and Jeff Cogswell, is now for sale at Amazon.com and other book sellers.
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The C++ Cookbook, is a collection of over a hundred recipes for common programming tasks from building a DLL, to parsing XML. The full list of recipes can be seen at www.cpp-cookbook.com, and a downloadable chapter should be posted here at Artima.com soon. I was responsible for the chapters on dates and times, and science and mathematics.
I am particularly proud of this book, because unlike many C++ books it is isn't a boring old reference. Nor is it a list of things that you shouldn't do with C++. In my opinion, it is usually more useful, and more difficult, to say how to accomplish a task, than to say how not to accomplish a task.
On another note, you may notice I have changed my blog bio. It apparently rubbed people the wrong way that I mentioned I was looking for work, well that along with my general charming persona which I can't change. So I dropped the line about work. Hopefully the new bio isn't seen as being quite as self-promotional.
Reading the table of contents, did O'Reilly have a particular audience in mind when creating this book? The book covers "defining a macro" (1.19) and "writing your own stream manipulators" (10.3).
Yes, part of that is the natural progression from easy things in chapter 1 to harder things later on. But even within chapters it appears that some things are targeted at programmers just out of "C++ For Dummies," and other things are included because the obvious way has hidden pitfalls.
The only reason I'm bringing this up is that I'm trying to figure out what percentage of the book would be useful to me. Clearly I'm the only one who can answer that. It looks like I'll have to wait 'till my local bookstore carries it before I have the information I need to make the judgement.
> Reading the table of contents, did O'Reilly have a > particular audience in mind when creating this book?
The audience would probably be best described as non-experts. We tried to write recipes for people without much experience with C++, and not much time to study the language thoroughly.
I wonder, why should most -if not all- computer science books put a photo of a wild animal -some times Dinasours- on the cover. I've been noticing this since my early days in colleage. Do you have explaination?
I have read the sample chapter 10 (Streams and Files) and it starts off with a very useful discussion on streams. I like the format although sometimes the discussion section can seem pretty basic (e.g. explaining the fixed number format). I would like to have seen a bit in the reading and writing classes to streams about how to read a class back into a stream with some version checking and handling for when the class members change.
The chapter does end up reading a lot like an advert for boost though as many of the file operations are OS dependant. To me that doesn't really seem like a helpful solution to the problem as if I am willing to go and find a portable library then I will just read the library docs to find what functions it supports. Does the rest of the book have such a leaning towards boost?
Anyway I think this is a book I would definitely like to have a look at in a bookshop before deciding whether it is worth the investment, but from what I've seen it is definitely worth putting aside the time to do that.
> I wonder, why should most -if not all- computer science > books put a photo of a wild animal -some times Dinasours- > on the cover. > I've been noticing this since my early days in colleage. > Do you have explaination?
It's an O'Reilly thing. Classic O'Reilly books often get referred to simply by their animal, e.g. the camel book (on Perl IIRC)
> > I wonder, why should most -if not all- computer science > > books put a photo of a wild animal -some times > Dinasours- > > on the cover. > > I've been noticing this since my early days in > colleage. > > Do you have explaination?
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