This is a must read for intermediate level and higher programmers. One of the book's strengths is its conciseness, which makes it easier to read without getting tied up in a lot of details. Because of this, the reader must take it upon himself/herself to check the readings in the supplied references (given for each rule) to completely understand the terms/idioms/ideas mentioned in the rule. This is not at all a weakness in the book, as it's purpose is to summarize the rule/guideline/practice, so they can put it to use, while leaving it up to the reader to refer to readings in the given references, to obtain a greater understanding of the ideas used in that rule. Most of the references can be found in the authors' previous works. The book also makes reference to standard time tested design patterns and ideas, so it would be good to have the text "Design Patterns" read, or close by.

I've been a programmer since the earliest 90's, a professional software engineer since the 2000, and I would say that book contains many of the things you learn through your carrier, exposed in a very pleasant way.

101 rules, mostly described in one or 2 pages make it a good reading before fall asleep, a good reminder of best practices that should not be forgotten. In these times, where code reviews are part of our daily activity, being aligned and focused makes the job more easy.

For novice it's for sure a good set of best-practices to be learned. For intermediate-expert it provides a clean and well focused reasoning on every single rule, good for tutoring and nice nuts of knowledge.

A must have.

I have great respect for both authors from reading their other books/articles, and there are many good ideas in this book, but I was expecting to agree with the authors here much more than I do.

Item 0: Don't sweat the small stuff. The authors say not to overlegislate naming and bracing standards, but they also say "do be consistent" and don't mix styles. From personal experience, I can say the only way to get a group of programmers to be consistent is by "sweating the small stuff" and having well-defined policies that are strictly enforced.

Item 1: Zero tolerance of warnings. Eliminating Level 4 warnings (in Visual C++) from a complex application (as opposed to a library intended for third-party use) is more trouble than it's worth. The authors' suggestion to decrease code readability (Examples 2 and 3) to get around these warnings is quite a bad idea, in my opinion.

Item 59: I wish somehow there could be a better answer to the C++ namespace issue. Giving many symbols (but not all, like preprocessor macros, classes not in a namespace, etc.) two names (the qualified and the unqualified) based on where that symbol appears seems so wrong and at the very least makes searching and cut-and-pasting more difficult.

The authors clearly prefer use of stl over custom containers (although they have not always followed their own advice), but they don't address many issues related to this, like are teams using stl supposed to use the peculiar stl naming practices across the board in all code, so stl dictates naming and all projects would use naming like some_stl_vector.push_back()? Or would code like m_object.DoSomething() be mixed together with the above statement so there really is no standard? What are programmers to do when the stl containers don't cut it and a custom container is needed? Should they write it in the stl idiom or consistent with their own naming standard?

Many of the examples refer to std::string, and even a few use const char *, in a book like this I would prefer not to see uses of these types that are not localization-friendly, since it is a best practices type of book, after all.

The book's proofreaders are very good but I believe they missed one error on Item 61, page 112, near the bottom: "Do not definite..." I'm assuming should be "Do not define..."

Anyway, I do recommend this book, and I do agree with most of the items, the authors raise many good points to consider when a team is deciding on its own coding standard.

C++ Coding Standards is one of the best books about C++ that I have read, although I feel the title can be somewhat misleading. When the average programmer thinks "coding standard", their mind probably thinks of a crusty old document on their company wiki somewhere that tells them exactly how to lay out their curly brackets. This book is not that at all, but rather an awesome collection of C++ wisdom that should be useful to anyone using the language. Sutter and Alexandrescu write in a wonderful conversational style that reading this book is almost like sitting down for a chat with these two masters of C++ and software development.

I've learned a lot from this book, and it's a fantastic resource for C++ developers of all skill levels. Highly recommended!

Very easy to read. Much is advice each of us have already learned through experience. Many suggestions that we have not thought of but can relate to because of on the job learning. Some of the standards are violated by several of my customers and having worked in those environments it is clear how impotent the standard is. My Customers need to read this book.

Great to have easy to read practical lessons learned documented all in one place.

Every programming language has a list of caveats and things you generally shouldn't do; although it is a bit outdated, many of the concepts are still very applicable to modern day C++ programming. However, this book really shines because it tells you the caveat and tells how what to look out for if you do decide to implement the design. So it doesn't take a "Don't ever do this" approach that many other design books take.

Such a great book to pick up, flip to a random page, and read. I’ve learned so many good practices.

This book is for newbies. If you read a lot about c++ effective, c++ whatever series, this is not the book for you. It's not because the materials are easy, they've just been mentioned and referenced by books and internet for so LONG.

I personally think the word "Standards" in the title is just misleading and WRONG!!. That's also the reason I had high expectation from this book, but obviously made me very upset after reading it. I guess it was still my fault, because the book is obviously not organized systematically as indicated by the title.

So Read the book title three more times before you decide if it's the right book for u.

This is a great book, it's not a reference book though.

Many C++ books are crap, they don't cross what I call "the Hello World gulf" this is the huge gap between examples and whatnot and actual programs and useful stuff.

This book helps the crossing. You should be okay on the Hello World stuff and just starting to write programs that do stuff (by this I mean have an IDE and GUI programs that respond to input, you know actual stuff - Eclipse CDT and WxWidgets FTW!) you'll pick this book up and find some of them are things you already do, or have already picked up without being told they are worthy of report.

The ones you don't know will be explained so well you can see why you'd want to do it that way.

There are other reviews praising this book already and I don't want to re-iterate those again (consider me in chorus with them though) this book is one of the best C++ books out there because it's actually useful in crossing that gulf.

Alec

Scott MeyersがEffectiveシリーズで詳しく説明してくれてはいるが少し冗長になってしまっているC++のベストプラクティスの指針をコンパクトにまとめてくれていると感じた。

この本とEffectiveシリーズ、ISOCppのCppCoreGuideline、あとGoogleのC++ Style Guideを読んでその作法に従っていれば、そのうちBjarne Stroustrupが言う「エレガントでシンプルな」コードに近づける気がする。

日本での参考書はただの「文法の羅列」であり、言語の物知りしか生み出さないような構成になっているが、本書のような本を読まなければ良いプログラマーにはなれないのだと読み進めていくうちにますます実感した

I really should have looked at the publication date (2005). Much of the information is out of date given C++11. Still good stuff in there but you have to be aware that not all things apply for C++11. It is not the authoritative source I was looking for.

Éste es uno de los libros indispensables para cualquiera que quiera programar correctamente en c++.

Hay que tener en cuenta que no es un manual de programación, sinó que cita y argumenta las reglas esenciales para poder programar correctamente en c++.

Simple and Easy language. Clear Understandings.