Praise for Scott Meyers’ first book, Effective C++:

“I heartily recommend Effective C++ to anyone who aspires to mastery of C++ at the intermediate level or above.”

– The C/C++ User’s Journal

From the author of the indispensable Effective C++, here are 35 new ways to improve your programs and designs. Drawing on years of experience, Meyers explains how to write software that is more effective: more efficient, more robust, more consistent, more portable, and more reusable. In short, how to write C++ software that’s just plain better.

More Effective C++ includes:

• Proven methods for improving program efficiency, including incisive examinations of the time/space costs of C++ language features

• Comprehensive descriptions of advanced techniques used by C++ experts, including placement new, virtual constructors, smart pointers, reference counting, proxy classes, and double-dispatching

• Examples of the profound impact of exception handling on the structure and behavior of C++ classes and functions

• Practical treatments of new language features, including bool, mutable, explicit, namespaces, member templates, the Standard Template Library, and more. If your compilers don’t yet support these features, Meyers shows you how to get the job done without them.

More Effective C++ is filled with pragmatic, down-to-earth advice you’ll use every day. Like Effective C++ before it, More Effective C++ is essential reading for anyone working with C++.

Scott Meyers is one of the world's foremost authorities on C++, providing training and consulting services to clients worldwide. He is the author of the best-selling Effective C++ series of books (Effective C++, More Effective C++, and Effective STL) and of the innovative Effective C++ CD. He is consulting editor for Addison Wesley's Effective Software Development Series and serves on the Advisory Board for The C++ Source (http://www.artima.com/cppsource). He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Brown University. His web site is http://www.aristeia.com.

Acknowledgments  xi

Introduction  1

Basics  9

Item 1: Distinguish between pointers and references.  9

Item 2: Prefer C++-style casts.  12

Item 3: Never treat arrays polymorphically.  16

Item 4: Avoid gratuitous default constructors.  19

Operators  24

Item 5: Be wary of user-defined conversion functions.  24

Item 6: Distinguish between prefix and postfix forms of increment and decrement operators.  31

Item 7: Never overload andand, , or ,.  35

Item 8: Understand the different meanings of new and delete.  38

Exceptions  44

Item 9: Use destructors to prevent resource leaks.  45

Item 10: Prevent resource leaks in constructors.  50

Item 11: Prevent exceptions from leaving destructors.  58

Item 12: Understand how throwing an exception differs from passing a parameter or calling a virtual function.  61

Item 13: Catch exceptions by reference.  68

Item 14: Use exception specifications judiciously.  72

Item 15: Understand the costs of exception handling.  78

Efficiency  81

Item 16: Remember the 80-20 rule.  82

Item 17: Consider using lazy evaluation.  85

Item 18: Amortize the cost of expected computations.  93

Item 19: Understand the origin of temporary objects.  98

Item 20: Facilitate the return value optimization.  101

Item 21: Overload to avoid implicit type conversions.  105

Item 22: Consider using op= instead of stand-alone op.  107

Item 23: Consider alternative libraries.  110

Item 24: Understand the costs of virtual functions, multiple inheritance, virtual base classes, and RTTI.  113

Techniques  123

Item 25: Virtualizing constructors and non-member functions.  123

Item 26: Limiting the number of objects of a class.  130

Item 27: Requiring or prohibiting heap-based objects.  145

Item 28: Smart pointers.  159

Item 29: Reference counting.  183

Item 30: Proxy classes.  213

Item 31: Making functions virtual with respect to more than one object.  228

Miscellany  252

Item 32: Program in the future tense.  252

Item 33: Make non-leaf classes abstract.  258

Item 34: Understand how to combine C++ and C in the same program.  270

Item 35: Familiarize yourself with the language standard.  277

Recommended Reading  285

An auto_ptr Implementation  291

General Index  295

Index of Example Classes, Functions, and Templates  313