Product Description

The first book to provide complete and accurate information on using templates in C++. A complete reference as well as a tutorial. Includes real-world examples. Every working C++ programmer will need a copy of this book for his or her library.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #87081 in Books
• Published on: 2002-11-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 552 pages

From the Back Cover

Templates are among the most powerful features of C++, but they are too often neglected, misunderstood, and misused. C++ Templates: The Complete Guide provides software architects and engineers with a clear understanding of why, when, and how to use templates to build and maintain cleaner, faster, and smarter software more efficiently.

C++ Templates begins with an insightful tutorial on basic concepts and language features. The remainder of the book serves as a comprehensive reference, focusing first on language details, then on a wide range of coding techniques, and finally on advanced applications for templates. Examples used throughout the book illustrate abstract concepts and demonstrate best practices.

Readers learn

• The exact behaviors of templates
• How to avoid the pitfalls associated with templates
• Idioms and techniques, from the basic to the previously undocumented
• How to reuse source code without threatening performance or safety
• How to increase the efficiency of C++ programs
• How to produce more flexible and maintainable software

This practical guide shows programmers how to exploit the full power of the template features in C++.

About the Author

David Vandevoorde is an engineer at the Edison Design Group. He is an active member of the ANSI C++ Standards Committee, and a cofounder of the newsgroup comp.lang.c++.moderated. A graduate of the Brussels Free University and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, his interests include algorithm development, programming languages, and teaching. See vandevoorde.

Nicolai M. Josuttis is an independent technical consultant who designs object-oriented software for the telecommunications, traffic, finance, and manufacturing industries. He is an active member of the C++ Standards Committee Library Working Group. Nicolai has written several books on object-oriented programming and C++. See josuttis.

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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The idea of templates in C++ is more than ten years old. C++ templates were already documented in 1990 in the Annotated C++ Reference Manual or so-called "ARM" (see EllisStroustrupARM) and they had been described before that in more specialized publications. However, well over a decade later we found a dearth of literature that concentrates on the fundamental concepts and advanced techniques of this fascinating, complex, and powerful C++ feature. We wanted to address this issue and decided to write the book about templates (with perhaps a slight lack of humility).

However, we approached the task with different backgrounds and with different intentions. David, an experienced compiler implementer and member of the C++ Standard Committee Core Language Working Group, was interested in an exact and detailed description of all the power (and problems) of templates. Nico, an "ordinary" application programmer and member of the C++ Standard Committee Library Working Group, was interested in understanding all the techniques of templates in a way that he could use and benefit from them. In addition, we both wanted to share this knowledge with you, the reader, and the whole community to help to avoid further misunderstanding, confusion, or apprehension.

As a consequence, you will see both conceptual introductions with day-to-day examples and detailed descriptions of the exact behavior of templates. Starting from the basic principles of templates and working up to the "art of template programming," you will discover (or rediscover) techniques such as static polymorphism, policy classes, metaprogramming, and expression templates. You will also gain a deeper understanding of the C++ standard library, in which almost all code involves templates.

We learned a lot and we had much fun while writing this book. We hope you will have the same experience while reading it. Enjoy!

Acknowledgments

This book presents ideas, concepts, solutions, and examples from many sources. In a way it does not seem fair that our names are the only ones on the cover. We'd like to thank all the people and companies who helped and supported us during the past few years. First, we'd like to thank all the reviewers and everyone else who gave us their opinion on early manuscripts. These people endow the book with a quality it would never have had without their input. The reviewers for this book were Kyle Blaney, Thomas Gschwind, Dennis Mancl, Patrick McKillen, and Jan Christiaan van Winkel. Special thanks to Dietmar Kuhl who meticulously reviewed and edited the whole book. His feedback was an incredible contribution to the quality of this book. We'd also like to thank all the people and companies who gave us the opportunity to test our examples on different platforms with different compilers. Many thanks to the Edison Design Groupfor their great compiler and their support. It was a big help during the standardization process and the writing of this book. Many thanks also go to all the developers of the free GNU and egcs compilers (Jason Merrill was especially responsive), and to Microsoft for an evaluation version of Visual C++ (Jonathan Caves, Herb Sutter and Jason Shirk were our contacts there).

Much of the existing "C++ Wisdom" was collectively created by the online C++ community. Most of that comes from the moderated Usenet groups comp.lang.c++.moderated and comp.std.c++. We are therefore especially indebted to the active moderators of those groups, who keep the discussions useful and constructive. We also much appreciate all those who over the years have taken the time to describe and explain their ideas for us all to share.The Addison Wesley team did another great job. We are most indebted to Debbie Lafferty (our editor) for her gentle prodding, good advice, and relentless hard work in support of this book. We're grateful also to Marina Lang who first sponsored this book within Addison Wesley. Susan Winer contributed an early round of editing that helped shape our later work.

Nico's Acknowledgments

My first personal thanks goes with a lot kisses to my family: Ulli, Lucas, Anica, and Frederic did support this book with a lot patience, consideration, and spur. In addition, I want to thank David. His expertise turned out to be incredible. But, his patience was even better (sometimes I ask really silly questions). It is a lot of fun to work with him.

David's Acknowledgments

My wife Karina has been instrumental in this book coming to a conclusion and I am immensely grateful for the role that she plays in my life. Writing "in your spare time" quickly becomes erratic when many other activities vie for your schedule. Karina helped me to manage that schedule, taught me to say "No" in order to make the time needed to make regular progress in the writing process,and above all was amazingly supportive of this project. I thank God every day for her friendship and love.

I'm also tremendously grateful to have been able to work with Nico. Besides his directly visible contributions to the text, his experience and discipline moved us from my pitiful doodling to a well organized production.John "Mr. Template" Spicer and Steve "Mr. Overload" Adamczyk are wonderful friends and colleagues, but in my opinion they are (together) also the ultimate authority regarding the core C++ language. They clarified many of the trickier issues described in this book, and should you find an error in the description of a C++ language element, it is almost certainly attributable to my failing toconsult with them.

Finally, I want to express my appreciation to those who were supportive of this project without necessarily contributing to it directly (the power of cheer cannot be understated). First are my parents: Their love for me and their encouragements make all the difference. And then, there are the numerous friends constantly asking "How is the book going?"; they too were a source of encouragement: Michael Beckmann, Brett and Julie Beene, Jarran Carr, Simon Chang, Ho and Sarah Cho, Christophe De Dinechin, Peter and Ewa Deelman, Neil and Tammy Eberle, Sassan Hazeghi, Vikram Kumar, Jim and Lindsay Long, Franklin Luk, Richard and Marianna Morgan, Ragu Raghavendra, Jim and Phuong Sharp, Gregg Vaughn, and John Wiegley.

Customer Reviews

You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll fall down...
Templates are increasingly becoming one of the most important
aspects of C++ programming, and are the central feature of the
most creative and innovative new C++ projects.

They are reasonably simple in concept, but in the effort to make
them behave "intuitively" for common cases, the actual rules that
describe what they do are hideously complicated. A guide for the
perplexed was sorely needed, and fortunately, has now appeared.

I'm no slouch at the subject myself, but I learned a few things
that I had no inkling of before, just on a casual reading of the
first few chapters. (Although the main thing I am learning once
again is just how insanely stupid C++ syntax is, and how awful
was the choice of angle brackets for template delimiters.) The
authors are experts on the subject, and the material is presented
clearly, with many examples, and above all correctly.

This is another must-have book for people who want to understand
all of C++. (Not that that's possible, except for perhaps half a
dozen people or so. I'll bet more people understand General
Relativity.)

Comprehensive and Thorough
This is a book that the C++ community has been in need of for several years, and it seems that an ideal team of authors has come together for this: Nicolai Josuttis again contributes the thoroughness and lucid writing that has made his earlier book _The C++ Standard Library_ such a pleasure to read, and David Vandevoorde contributes historical background about the evolution of C++ standard and its implementations that help to understand some of the peculiarities of how C++ works today and some of the directions it's likely to evolve in.

The book is divided into 4 parts. Part I gives a basic overview of the template mechanisms in C++ and part II goes into more detail on this. Part III applies templates to standard problems, while part IV covers more exotic uses of templates similar to what is discussed in Alexandrescu's _Modern C++ Design_. Even for a reasonably experienced template user like me, there were many details I learned even from the most fundamental part I.

This is a near perfect book (apart from a few apparent bugs in the code examples that hopefully will get corrected) that will greatly benefit any programmer who works with template based code.

A Definitive Reference to C++ Template Implementations
Hi,

David Vandevoorde and Nicolai Josuttis write a definitive reference to C++ template implementations. This book comprises of four key sections including fundamental template implementations, in-depth template implementations, template designs, and advanced template designs (libraries). The authors are extremely thorough in their explanations of all essential template implementation techniques and provide an unprecedented in-depth analysis on C++ template parameters, arguments, specialization, and overloading. The analysis on these techniques is very valuable. One reason is because in most cases the authors include examples of implementations that do not work and then provide working solutions. For example, they discuss template argument deduction processes especially for template function overloading. There is even a chapter where they analyze C++ compilers and different template instantiation models. In C++ Templates: The Complete Guide, the authors discuss essential C++ template designs and implementation techniques and provide valuable analysis along with some of the more important topics, making this book a definitive reference to C++ template implementations.

In section three and four, Vandevoorde and Josuttis discuss and demonstrate powerful C++ designs utilizing C++ template techniques from previous sections. Topics and examples in these sections incorporate advanced C++ template designs and implementations similar to the foundation of the STL. One example is element binding as in std::pair.

I recommend C++ Templates: The Complete Guide to all real-world C++ programmers.