If, having digested 50 ways to improve your programs and designs, you still find yourself hungry for C++ guidelines, you may be interested in my second book on the subject, More Effective C++: 35 New Ways to Improve Your Programs and Design. Like Effective C++, More Effective C++ covers material that's essential for effective C++ software development, but Effective C++ focuses more on fundamentals, while More Effective C++ also spends time on newer language features and on advanced programming
You can find detailed information on More Effective C++ — including four complete Items, the book's list of recommended reading, and more — at the
| Dedication | |||
| Acknowledgments | |||
| Introduction | |||
| Distinguish between pointers and references | |||
| Prefer C++-style casts | |||
| Never treat arrays polymorphically | |||
| Avoid gratuitous default constructors | |||
| Be wary of user-defined conversion functions | |||
| Distinguish between prefix and postfix forms of increment and decrement operators | |||
Never overload &&, ||, or ,
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Understand the different meanings of new and delete
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| Use destructors to prevent resource leaks | |||
| Prevent resource leaks in constructors | |||
| Prevent exceptions from leaving destructors | |||
| Understand how throwing an exception differs from passing a parameter or calling a virtual function | |||
| Catch exceptions by reference | |||
| Use exception specifications judiciously | |||
| Understand the costs of exception handling | |||
| Remember the 80-20 rule | |||
| Consider using lazy evaluation | |||
| Amortize the cost of expected computations | |||
| Understand the origin of temporary objects | |||
| Facilitate the return value optimization | |||
| Overload to avoid implicit type conversions | |||
| Consider using op= instead of stand-alone op | |||
| Consider alternative libraries | |||
| Understand the costs of virtual functions, multiple inheritance, virtual base classes, and RTTI | |||
| Virtualizing constructors and non-member functions | |||
| Limiting the number of objects of a class | |||
| Requiring or prohibiting heap-based objects | |||
| Smart pointers | |||
| Reference counting | |||
| Proxy classes | |||
| Making functions virtual with respect to more than one object | |||
| Program in the future tense | |||
| Make non-leaf classes abstract | |||
| Understand how to combine C++ and C in the same program | |||
| Familiarize yourself with the language standard | |||
auto_ptr Implementation | |||