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Acknowledgments
A great number of people helped bring this book into existence. Some contributed ideas for technical topics, some helped with the process of producing the book, and some just made life more fun while I was working on it.
When the number of contributors to a book is large, it is not uncommon to dispense with individual acknowledgments in favor of a generic "Contributors to this book are too numerous to mention." I prefer to follow the expansive lead of John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson in Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach (Morgan Kaufmann, 1995). In addition to motivating the comprehensive acknowledgments that follow, their book provides hard data for the 90-10 rule, which I refer to in Item 16.
The Items
With the exception of direct quotations, all the words in this book are mine. However, many of the ideas I discuss came from others. I have done my best to keep track of who contributed what, but I know I have included information from sources I now fail to recall, foremost among them many posters to the Usenet newsgroups comp.lang.c++ and comp.std.c++.
Many ideas in the C++ community have been developed independently by many people. In what follows, I note only where I was exposed to particular ideas, not necessarily where those ideas originated.
Brian Kernighan suggested the use of macros to approximate the syntax of the new C++ casting operators I describe in Item 2.
In Item 3, my warning about deleting an array of derived class objects through a base class pointer is based on material in Dan Saks' "Gotchas" talk, which he's given at several conferences and trade shows.
In Item 5, the proxy class technique for preventing unwanted application of single-argument constructors is based on material in Andrew Koenig's column in the January 1994 C++ Report.
James Kanze made a posting to comp.lang.c++ on implementing postfix increment and decrement operators via the corresponding prefix functions; I use his technique in Item 6.
David Cok, writing me about material I covered in Effective C++, brought to my attention the distinction between operator new and the new operator that is the crux of Item 8. Even after reading his letter, I didn't really understand the distinction, but without his initial prodding, I probably still wouldn't.
The notion of using destructors to prevent resource leaks (used in Item 9) comes from section 15.3 of Margaret A. Ellis' and Bjarne Stroustrup's The Annotated C++ Reference Manual (see page 285). There the technique is called resource acquisition is initialization. Tom Cargill suggested I shift the focus of the approach from resource acquisition to resource release.
Some of my discussion in Item 11 was inspired by material in Chapter 4 of Taligent's Guide to Designing Programs (Addison-Wesley, 1994).
My description of over-eager memory allocation for the DynArray class in Item 18 is based on Tom Cargill's article, "A Dynamic vector is harder than it looks," in the June 1992 C++ Report. A more sophisticated design for a dynamic array class can be found in Cargill's follow-up column in the January 1994 C++ Report.
Item 21 was inspired by Brian Kernighan's paper, "An AWK to C++ Translator," at the 1991 USENIX C++ Conference. His use of overloaded operators (sixty-seven of them!) to handle mixed-type arithmetic operations, though designed to solve a problem unrelated to the one I explore in Item 21, led me to consider multiple overloadings as a solution to the problem of temporary creation.
In Item 26, my design of a template class for counting objects is based on a posting to comp.lang.c++ by Jamshid Afshar.
The idea of a mixin class to keep track of pointers from operator new (see Item 27) is based on a suggestion by Don Box. Steve Clamage made the idea practical by explaining how dynamic_cast can be used to find the beginning of memory for an object.
The discussion of smart pointers in Item 28 is based in part on Steven Buroff's and Rob Murray's C++ Oracle column in the October 1993 C++ Report; on Daniel R. Edelson's classic paper, "Smart Pointers: They're Smart, but They're Not Pointers," in the proceedings of the 1992 USENIX C++ Conference; on section 15.9.1 of Bjarne Stroustrup's The Design and Evolution of C++ (see page 285); on Gregory Colvin's "C++ Memory Management" class notes from C/C++ Solutions '95; and on Cay Horstmann's column in the March-April 1993 issue of the C++ Report. I developed some of the material myself, though. Really.
In Item 29, the use of a base class to store reference counts and of smart pointers to manipulate those counts is based on Rob Murray's discussions of the same topics in sections 6.3.2 and 7.4.2, respectively, of his C++ Strategies and Tactics (see page 286). The design for adding reference counting to existing classes follows that presented by Cay Horstmann in his March-April 1993 column in the C++ Report.
In Item 30, my discussion of lvalue contexts is based on comments in Dan Saks' column in the C User's Journal C/C++ Users Journal) of January 1993. The observation that non-proxy member functions are unavailable when called through proxies comes from an unpublished paper by Cay Horstmann.
The use of runtime type information to build vtbl-like arrays of function pointers (in Item 31) is based on ideas put forward by Bjarne Stroustrup in postings to comp.lang.c++ and in section 13.8.1 of his The Design and Evolution of C++ (see page 285).
The material in Item 33 is based on several of my C++ Report columns in 1994 and 1995. Those columns, in turn, included comments I received from Klaus Kreft about how to use dynamic_cast to implement a virtual operator= that detects arguments of the wrong type.
Much of the material in Item 34 was motivated by Steve Clamage's article, "Linking C++ with other languages," in the May 1992 C++ Report. In that same Item, my treatment of the problems caused by functions like strdup was motivated by an anonymous reviewer.
The Book
Reviewing draft copies of a book is hard and vitally important work. I am grateful that so many people were willing to invest their time and energy on my behalf. I am especially grateful to Jill Huchital, Tim Johnson, Brian Kernighan, Eric Nagler, and Chris Van Wyk, as they read the book (or large portions of it) more than once. In addition to these gluttons for punishment, complete drafts of the manuscript were read by Katrina Avery, Don Box, Steve Burkett, Tom Cargill, Tony Davis, Carolyn Duby, Bruce Eckel, Read Fleming, Cay Horstmann, James Kanze, Russ Paielli, Steve Rosenthal, Robin Rowe, Dan Saks, Chris Sells, Webb Stacy, Dave Swift, Steve Vinoski, and Fred Wild. Partial drafts were reviewed by Bob Beauchaine, Gerd Hoeren, Jeff Jackson, and Nancy L. Urbano. Each of these reviewers made comments that greatly improved the accuracy, utility, and presentation of the material you find here.
Once the book came out, I received corrections and suggestions from many people. I've listed these sharp-eyed readers in the order in which I received their missives: Luis Kida, John Potter, Tim Uttormark, Mike Fulkerson, Dan Saks, Wolfgang Glunz, Clovis Tondo, Michael Loftus, Liz Hanks, Wil Evers, Stefan Kuhlins, Jim McCracken, Alan Duchan, John Jacobsma, Ramesh Nagabushnam, Ed Willink, Kirk Swenson, Jack Reeves, Doug Schmidt, Tim Buchowski, Paul Chisholm, Andrew Klein, Eric Nagler, Jeffrey Smith, Sam Bent, Oleg Shteynbuk, Anton Doblmaier, Ulf Michaelis, Sekhar Muddana, Michael Baker, Yechiel Kimchi, David Papurt, Ian Haggard, Robert Schwartz, David Halpin, Graham Mark, David Barrett, Damian Kanarek, Ron Coutts, Lance Whitesel, Jon Lachelt, Cheryl Ferguson, Munir Mahmood, Klaus-Georg Adams, David Goh, Chris Morley, and Rainer Baumschlager. Their suggestions allowed me to improve More Effective C++ in updated printings (such as this one), and I greatly appreciate their help.
During preparation of this book, I faced many questions about the emerging ISO/ANSI standard for C++, and I am grateful to Steve Clamage and Dan Saks for taking the time to respond to my incessant email queries.
John Max Skaller and Steve Rumsby conspired to get me the HTML for the draft ANSI C++ standard before it was widely available. Vivian Neou pointed me to the Netscape WWW browser as a stand-alone HTML viewer under (16 bit) Microsoft Windows, and I am deeply grateful to the folks at Netscape Communications for making their fine viewer freely available on such a pathetic excuse for an operating system.
Bryan Hobbs and Hachemi Zenad generously arranged to get me a copy of the internal engineering version of the MetaWare C++ compiler so I could check the code in this book using the latest features of the language. Cay Horstmann helped me get the compiler up and running in the very foreign world of DOS and DOS extenders. Borland (now Inprise) provided a beta copy of their most advanced compiler, and Eric Nagler and Chris Sells provided invaluable help in testing code for me on compilers to which I had no access.
Without the staff at the Corporate and Professional Publishing Division of Addison-Wesley, there would be no book, and I am indebted to Kim Dawley, Lana Langlois, Simone Payment, Marty Rabinowitz, Pradeepa Siva, John Wait, and the rest of the staff for their encouragement, patience, and help with the production of this work.
Chris Guzikowski helped draft the back cover copy for this book, and Tim Johnson stole time from his research on low-temperature physics to critique later versions of that text.
Tom Cargill graciously agreed to make his C++ Report article on exceptions available.
The People
Kathy Reed was responsible for my introduction to programming; surely she didn't deserve to have to put up with a kid like me. Donald French had faith in my ability to develop and present C++ teaching materials when I had no track record. He also introduced me to John Wait, my editor at Addison-Wesley, an act for which I will always be grateful. The triumvirate at Beaver Ridge Jayni Besaw, Lorri Fields, and Beth McKee provided untold entertainment on my breaks as I worked on the book.
My wife, Nancy L. Urbano, put up with me and put up with me and put up with me as I worked on the book, continued to work on the book, and kept working on the book. How many times did she hear me say we'd do something after the book was done? Now the book is done, and we will do those things. She amazes me. I love her.
Finally, I must acknowledge our puppy, Persephone, whose existence changed our world forever. Without her, this book would have been finished both sooner and with less sleep deprivation, but also with substantially less comic relief. Back to Dedication
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