Afterword

I l @ ve RuBoard

I hope you've enjoyed not just the puzzles and problems in this book and its predecessor Exceptional C++ , but also the solutions and techniques that have been presented. Most of these solutions and techniques have been carefully designed to be directly applicable and useful to your production coding today. I hope you've found even just a few things here that have been immediately useful in your daily work. If you have, it's been a success.

As before, I should add that there's more where this came from. Today, on the Internet, new Guru of the Week issues are being published and discussed and debated on the newsgroup comp.lang.c++. moderated , and are archived at the official Web site at www.Gotw.ca. These topics and much more will in time be incorporated into the third and concluding volume of the Exceptional C++ books, Exceptional C++ Style . Here's a small sampling of the material you can expect to see in the next book.

• More and new information on popular themes you've already seen in the first two books, including generic programming and template techniques; solid class design using encapsulation, along with ways of enforcing rules for derived classes; efficiency and optimization; effective use of the standard library, with analysis of how much memory and resources the various standard containers use in practice (not just theory) on today's popular platforms; and the de rigueur exception safety issues and techniques. These take the next step beyond Items like 1 through 8, 12 through 23, and 26 through 28 in this book.

• Practical information on real-world issues, such as writing code for debuggability, efficient data formats, and compression issues.

• Pragmatic discussions of how memory management issues can vary and potentially affect your code differently on various real-world platforms, even if you're using fully standard-conforming compilers on all those platforms.

• But, most important of all: A set of real-world case studies, dissecting actual production code and code that's been published in print, in order to demonstrate the exceptional style guidelines recommended throughout the Exceptional C++ books.

Thanks again to all who have expressed interest and support for Exceptional C++ and this book. I hope you've found this material to be useful in your daily work, as you keep on writing faster, cleaner, and safer C++ programs.

I l @ ve RuBoard