Acknowledgments

Effective C++ has existed for fifteen years, and I started learning C++ about five years before I wrote the book. The "Effective C++ project" has thus been under development for two decades. During that time, I have benefited from the insights, suggestions, corrections, and, occasionally, dumbfounded stares of hundreds (thousands?) of people. Each has helped improve Effective C++. I am grateful to them all.

I've given up trying to keep track of where I learned what, but one general source of information has helped me as long as I can remember: the Usenet C++ newsgroups, especially comp.lang.c++.moderated and comp.std.c++. Many of the Items in this book perhaps most have benefited from the vetting of technical ideas at which the participants in these newsgroups excel.

Regarding new material in the third edition, Steve Dewhurst worked with me to come up with an initial set of candidate Items. In Item 11, the idea of implementing operator= via copy-and-swap came from Herb Sutter's writings on the topic, e.g., Item 13 of his Exceptional C++ (Addison-Wesley, 2000). RAII (see Item 13) is from Bjarne Stroustrup's The C++ Programming Language (Addison-Wesley, 2000). The idea behind Item 17 came from the "Best Practices" section of the Boost shared_ptr web page, http://boost.org/libs/smart_ptr/shared_ptr.htm#BestPractices and was refined by Item 21 of Herb Sutter's More Exceptional C++ (Addison-Wesley, 2002). Item 29 was strongly influenced by Herb Sutter's extensive writings on the topic, e.g., Items 8-19 of Exceptional C++, Items 17 23 of More Exceptional C++, and Items 11 13 of Exceptional C++ Style (Addison-Wesley, 2005); David Abrahams helped me better understand the three exception safety guarantees. The NVI idiom in Item 35 is from Herb Sutter's column, "Virtuality," in the September 2001 C/C++ Users Journal. In that same Item, the Template Method and Strategy design patterns are from Design Patterns (Addison-Wesley, 1995) by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides. The idea of using the NVI idiom in Item 37 came from Hendrik Schober. David Smallberg contributed the motivation for writing a custom set implementation in Item 38. Item 39's observation that the EBO generally isn't available under multiple inheritance is from David Vandevoorde's and Nicolai M. Josuttis' C++ Templates (Addison-Wesley, 2003). In Item 42, my initial understanding about typename came from Greg Comeau's C++ and C FAQ (http://www.comeaucomputing.com/techtalk/#typename), and Leor Zolman helped me realize that my understanding was incorrect. (My fault, not Greg's.) The essence of Item 46 is from Dan Saks' talk, "Making New Friends." The idea at the end of Item 52 that if you declare one version of operator new, you should declare them all, is from Item 22 of Herb Sutter's Exceptional C++ Style. My understanding of the Boost review process (summarized in Item 55) was refined by David Abrahams.

Everything above corresponds to who or where I learned about something, not necessarily to who or where the thing was invented or first published.

My notes tell me that I also used information from Steve Clamage, Antoine Trux, Timothy Knox, and Mike Kaelbling, though, regrettably, the notes fail to tell me how or where.

Drafts of the first edition were reviewed by Tom Cargill, Glenn Carroll, Tony Davis, Brian Kernighan, Jak Kirman, Doug Lea, Moises Lejter, Eugene Santos, Jr., John Shewchuk, John Stasko, Bjarne Stroustrup, Barbara Tilly, and Nancy L. Urbano. I received suggestions for improvements that I was able to incorporate in later printings from Nancy L. Urbano, Chris Treichel, David Corbin, Paul Gibson, Steve Vinoski, Tom Cargill, Neil Rhodes, David Bern, Russ Williams, Robert Brazile, Doug Morgan, Uwe Steinmüller, Mark Somer, Doug Moore, David Smallberg, Seth Meltzer, Oleg Shteynbuk, David Papurt, Tony Hansen, Peter McCluskey, Stefan Kuhlins, David Braunegg, Paul Chisholm, Adam Zell, Clovis Tondo, Mike Kaelbling, Natraj Kini, Lars Nyman, Greg Lutz, Tim Johnson, John Lakos, Roger Scott, Scott Frohman, Alan Rooks, Robert Poor, Eric Nagler, Antoine Trux, Cade Roux, Chandrika Gokul, Randy Mangoba, and Glenn Teitelbaum.

Drafts of the second edition were reviewed by Derek Bosch, Tim Johnson, Brian Kernighan, Junichi Kimura, Scott Lewandowski, Laura Michaels, David Smallberg, Clovis Tondo, Chris Van Wyk, and Oleg Zabluda. Later printings benefited from comments from Daniel Steinberg, Arunprasad Marathe, Doug Stapp, Robert Hall, Cheryl Ferguson, Gary Bartlett, Michael Tamm, Kendall Beaman, Eric Nagler, Max Hailperin, Joe Gottman, Richard Weeks, Valentin Bonnard, Jun He, Tim King, Don Maier, Ted Hill, Mark Harrison, Michael Rubenstein, Mark Rodgers, David Goh, Brenton Cooper, Andy Thomas-Cramer, Antoine Trux, John Wait, Brian Sharon, Liam Fitzpatrick, Bernd Mohr, Gary Yee, John O'Hanley, Brady Patterson, Christopher Peterson, Feliks Kluzniak, Isi Dunietz, Christopher Creutzi, Ian Cooper, Carl Harris, Mark Stickel, Clay Budin, Panayotis Matsinopoulos, David Smallberg, Herb Sutter, Pajo Misljencevic, Giulio Agostini, Fredrik Blomqvist, Jimmy Snyder, Byrial Jensen, Witold Kuzminski, Kazunobu Kuriyama, Michael Christensen, Jorge Yáñez Teruel, Mark Davis, Marty Rabinowitz, Ares Lagae, and Alexander Medvedev.

An early partial draft of this edition was reviewed by Brian Kernighan, Angelika Langer, Jesse Laeuchli, Roger E. Pedersen, Chris Van Wyk, Nicholas Stroustrup, and Hendrik Schober. Reviewers for a full draft were Leor Zolman, Mike Tsao, Eric Nagler, Gene Gutnik, David Abrahams, Gerhard Kreuzer, Drosos Kourounis, Brian Kernighan, Andrew Kirmse, Balog Pal, Emily Jagdhar, Eugene Kalenkovich, Mike Roze, Enrico Carrara, Benjamin Berck, Jack Reeves, Steve Schirripa, Martin Fallenstedt, Timothy Knox, Yun Bai, Michael Lanzetta, Philipp Janert, Guido Bartolucci, Michael Topic, Jeff Scherpelz, Chris Nauroth, Nishant Mittal, Jeff Somers, Hal Moroff, Vincent Manis, Brandon Chang, Greg Li, Jim Meehan, Alan Geller, Siddhartha Singh, Sam Lee, Sasan Dashtinezhad, Alex Marin, Steve Cai, Thomas Fruchterman, Cory Hicks, David Smallberg, Gunavardhan Kakulapati, Danny Rabbani, Jake Cohen, Hendrik Schober, Paco Viciana, Glenn Kennedy, Jeffrey D. Oldham, Nicholas Stroustrup, Matthew Wilson, Andrei Alexandrescu, Tim Johnson, Leon Matthews, Peter Dulimov, and Kevlin Henney. Drafts of some individual Items were reviewed by Herb Sutter and Attila F. Feher.

Reviewing an unpolished (possibly incomplete) manuscript is demanding work, and doing it under time pressure only makes it harder. I continue to be grateful that so many people have been willing to undertake it for me.

Reviewing is harder still if you have no background in the material being discussed and are expected to catch every problem in the manuscript. Astonishingly, some people still choose to be copy editors. Chrysta Meadowbrooke was the copy editor for this book, and her very thorough work exposed many problems that eluded everyone else.

Leor Zolman checked all the code examples against multiple compilers in preparation for the full review, then did it again after I revised the manuscript. If any errors remain, I'm responsible for them, not Leor.

Karl Wiegers and especially Tim Johnson offered rapid, helpful feedback on back cover copy.

John Wait, my editor for the first two editions of this book, foolishly signed up for another tour of duty in that capacity. His assistant, Denise Mickelsen, adroitly handled my frequent pestering with a pleasant smile. (At least I think she's been smiling. I've never actually seen her.) Julie Nahil drew the short straw and hence became my production manager. She handled the overnight loss of six weeks in the production schedule with remarkable equanimity. John Fuller (her boss) and Marty Rabinowitz (his boss) helped out with production issues, too. Vanessa Moore's official job was to help with FrameMaker issues and PDF preparation, but she also added the entries to Appendix B and formatted it for printing on the inside cover. Solveig Haugland helped with index formatting. Sandra Schroeder and Chuti Prasertsith were responsible for cover design, though Chuti seems to have been the one who had to rework the cover each time I said, "But what about this photo with a stripe of that color...?" Chanda Leary-Coutu got tapped for the heavy lifting in marketing.

During the months I worked on the manuscript, the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer often helped me "de-stress" at the end of the day. Only with great restraint have I kept Buffyspeak out of the book.

Kathy Reed taught me programming in 1971, and I'm gratified that we remain friends to this day. Donald French hired me and Moises Lejter to create C++ training materials in 1989 (an act that led to my really knowing C++), and in 1991 he engaged me to present them at Stratus Computer. The students in that class encouraged me to write what ultimately became the first edition of this book. Don also introduced me to John Wait, who agreed to publish it.

My wife, Nancy L. Urbano, continues to encourage my writing, even after seven book projects, a CD adaptation, and a dissertation. She has unbelievable forbearance. I couldn't do what I do without her.

From start to finish, our dog, Persephone, has been a companion without equal. Sadly, for much of this project, her companionship has taken the form of an urn in the office. We really miss her.