Stoustrup’s book seems more focused on the language itself and less focused on how to use it. But, if you want to know why C++ is the way it is (although probably most people don’t), check out his other book The Design and Evolution of C++.

Nowadays, I have to consult the C++ standard itself once in a while (the only way to get a definitive answer on some very specific questions). ANSI sells it for about $30 (which is still highway robbery for a language standard). Don’t be afraid to get yourself a copy and have it as a reference.

I haven’t read the Scott Meyers books, but they are probably very good, not so much for learning the basics, but for how to solve the kinds of problems that come up a lot when using C++ in the real world. For this type of thing, also check out Herb Sutter’s books and his Guru of the Week articles.

In any case, you are definitely right, C++ is geared more toward experts. Hopefully C++0x will change that somewhat. However, I’m of the opinion that becoming a C++ expert is worth the effort. (Can you be an expert user of a language without being an expert in the language itself?)

Warning: Use of RAII may cause your debugging skills to falter, because you won’t need to use the debugger as often.

arr = [MyObj.new]

THanks so much.

The Scott Meyers’ books are probably what I’m looking for. After taking a few C++ classes at school, I’ve been through several books — and very important information such as the above, aren’t covered in beginning books.

Most of these beginning books cover syntax, a little OOP theory, a dash of UML 2 and after 800 pages and 15 chapters… congrats! You can put C++ on your resume now!

So this is very helpful stuff.

The web of course is an extremely helpful tool — but to answer specific questions without knowing why, it’s great. On example: What’s the fastest way to copy very large amounts of small files. The web has that answer, but usually never “why” the code is that answer. They don’t go into the depth and background you need to know… to get some experience so you can take that knowledge forth and prosper.

Keep up the great blog.

I don’t understand why everything surrounding copying is brought up so often, while I haven’t read much criticism for completely failed concepts such as argument dependent lookup, which is PHP-class bad in that it makes a seemingly harmless feature (calling a function) overly complex. Templates being complex is just something you should expect ;)

Kyle- Totally disagree. Define copying/assignment at the lowest level, i.e. smart pointers, containers etc., then just do nothing in the upper levels. Things owning an object that can’t be copied have a scoped_ptr member so aren’t copyable (rightly so!), structs that only have some strings and ints can be copied. Problem solved ;)

As far as understanding the under-workings of the STL, I think, instead, that a basic understanding of how different data structures work and where they are appropriate is sufficient, especially since, as previously pointed out, that the STL is implemented differently all over the place.

Also, PHP:

$arr = array( new MyObj() );

and JavaScript:

var MyObj = {}, arr = [ MyObj ];

I use Stroustrup, but I’m not convinced it is the best place to start. Whenever anyone asks me about books I usually just say “always choose an O’Reilly”, but in this case I happen to think that Practical C++ Programming is not that good (it’s the book I used to learn, and I didn’t find it inspiring).

This one looks quite cool: How Not to Program in C++, but I’ve never read it.

If you want to keep going deeper, I’ve found some really interesting stuff on the Dr Dobb’s Journal web site, and I can recommend ACCU’s publications Overload and CVu.

Scott Meyers‘ books “Effective C++” and “More Effective C++” are excellent, but not aimed at beginners. They cover exactly the type of thing I described above in this blog entry.

Perhaps others have suggestions for good books they used to learn C++?

Are there some good books that discuss this type of thing ? I’ve had a couple of C++ classes at college… and you know I’ve never run into that information before.

Thanks for the heads up….
Glen