Summary: One book has always set the standard for C++ programmers: The C++ Programming Language, by Bjarne Stroustrup, the Bell Laboratories developer who created C++. Now, Stroustrup has updated this classic with clarifications based on reader feedback and new information in two brand-new appendices on ISO/ANSI C++: internationalization and exception safety. This makes The C++ Programming Language: Special Edition the only book with authoritative coverage of every important element of C++.This book brings the authoritative perspective of the creator of C++ to everything from the core language through basic development techniques, the Standard Library, and effective program design. This new edition's updated coverage of Standard C++ locales enables developers to build code that can easily be customized for any market worldwide. Its coverage of exception safety allows programmers to take advantage of the standard library's support for more reliable code.
The author, Bjarne Stroustrup (bs@research.att.com) , May 22, 1998 What to expect "The C++ Programming Language (3rd Edition)" is aimed at programmers with some experienced and a wish to master C++. It is not aimed for non-programmers trying to learn their first programming language or casual programmers trying to gain a superficial understanding of C++ as fast as possible. Consequently, this book focuses on concepts and techniques and goes to some pain to be complete and precise.
The presentation is centered on small program fragments embedded in the text. The examples are chosen to illustrate fundamental programming techniques rather than to be immediately useful as part of a reader's code. The languageused is "pure C++" without vendor-specific extensions or system dependencies. Look to your vendor documentation for examples of how to deal with system-specific resources. To get the program fragments from the text to work, expect to have to add "scaffolding" in the form of header files, driver code (e.g. a main()), etc., and to supply parts of an example that I didn't need for the discussion of a concept or technique.
To illustrate the full language and an extensive range of techniques, I use language features available only in the latest compiler releases. One purpose of the book is to demonstrate the utility of facilities that at the time of writing were unavailable or unavailable to most people. At the time of writing, no compiler was capable of compiling every example in the book and no standard library implementation supported every facility described. For years to come, the use of advanced features will cause some problems to readers who use older compilers. I encourage upgrading to implementations that support full ISO C++, but understand that practical issues often force production code to be written in a language subset determined by older implementations.
This use of language features contrasts to the common sensible approach of maximizing the appeal of a book by describing only a subset of language features and only techniques that! work with all common implementations. One benefit of my approach is that it gives the book a much longer lifespan (the first and second editions each had a useful life as up-to-date descriptions of C++ and its use of about six years; I expect the useful life of the third edition to be longer).
This book can be used as a user-level reference for language features, standard library facilities, and programming techniques. However, it is not a reference manual or the standards text. If you need 100% precise and complete information you'll have to consult the text of the ISO C++ standard. Be warned that the standard is not a tutorial and it takes considerable effort and skill to extract answers from it. One aim in writing "The C++ Programming Language" has been to approximate the ideal that "if the answer isn't there, you'd better avoid the feature."
I take a very aggressive approach to "book maintenance." When I receive comments about bugs, typos, inaccuracies, possible ambiguities, omissions, suggested improvements, etc., I try to make improvements and post errata documenting what I've done. Much errata are improvements rather than fixes of errors. Thus, the amount of errata isn't a valid measure of errors. If you count omissions, inaccuracies, and ambiguities as errors, even the 1st printing of my 3rd edition had fewer errors than most books. By now, I'm confident enough to offer a bounty for each error found.
