Beautiful C++

I graduated from college without ever taking a C++ course. I never had a professor take off points on a C++ project, or had a senior developer tell me, "You don't do that in C++". And yet I am a respected C++ developer because I mostly did a good job of self-teaching. This book is a headfirst dive into the C++ Core Guidelines with some performance tips that I never knew, like *why* 4 is a magic number for arguments to a function versus a reference to a struct.

This is not a traditional "how to write c++" book. The authors engage in many stories of their past programming career to illustrate certain points of programming style. This makes for an enjoyable read, but you have to approach this differently from most other c++ books. It's a matter of reading along, trusting that somewhere down the line a point will emerge. It usually does, but these lessons take more mental effort to absorb than a straight textbook, and you probably need to have a bit of experience in programming that empathize with the point they are making. Also, for a programming book this has remarkable many pages that are (almost) pure text. Sometimes I wished for more code samples / diagrams.

This book was a great read. It delves into the reasoning behind the C++ Core Guidelines. This book will teach you how to write cleaner, more bug-free C++ Code. It was on par with Effective Modern C++.

Nice that it is slimmed down to just 30 items.But what is with the spurious hyphens. It makes it very annoying to read.

I was enticed by the Beautiful C++ title of this book. Code should definitely be beautiful but this books offers nothing to realize that goal; nothing beautiful inside, neither code nor insights.The author tries to explain technical subjects by describing in useless detail their past projects and coding experiences in an informal and chatty manner, dumb humor and tedious anecdotes included. The author obviously thinks all of their past programming experiences are amazing and incredibly interesting.Each chapter in the book attempts to cover a single Core C++ Guideline but typically introduces several topics with the actual Guideline buried somewhere in the text. The chapters are incredibly verbose with very little useful content.For example, the Don't Insist on Having a Single Return Statement chapter (yes, an entire chapter on this). The first two and a half pages describes the author's experience in 1981 programming games on a Sinclair ZX81 in assembly language. On the fifth page they briefly discuss RAII, which is useful, but then go on to a brief, muddled discussion of exceptions.I feel that 90% of the book is useless chatty fluff and most technically interesting Guidelines are buried in the text and not very well explained.An infinitely better book is the Core Guidelines book by Rainer Grimm, very useful explanations and excellent presentation.

Great book for those looking to write cleaner code

Glad to read it. It's easy to follow, makes a lot of interesting points and definitely it's a must in a programmer library.

The writers explain why we do what we do, or at least, what we ought to be doing. They also shed light on how we got here as the language and practice evolves. Indeed, it’s a wonderful read.