Review: More Effective C++

I decided to break from my 3D game engine book marathon and go to something more fundamental. More Effective C++ by Scott Meyers is one of those books I have  had on my wishlist for years but just hadn’t got around to reading yet.  I had read the original book  Effective C++ some years ago, and this sequel very much follows the same form. Though slightly dated now, it does cover a good amount of C++ design considerations that will show up in almost any decently complex C++ application.

The book covers a lot of OOP (object oriented programming) concepts and designs, and also a lot of the trouble you can get into using C++ without fully understanding what you are doing. Some of the coverage includes how to use abstract base classes and virtual functions. Specifically Meyers talks about memory management issues with construction and destruction, temporary objects, passing by value versus pointer/reference, and overloading copy/assignment constructors. He also discusses problems with using exceptions, explains how to write a smart pointer class (which is now obsolete with C++11, but still good to understand the implementation), using proxy objects, how to do lazy evaluation, and some various odds and ends.

Overall I found this to be a great text and very helpful, especially the discussion on inheritance and abstract base classes. If you really want to understand C++, warts and all, this should be a required text. However, please read the original title first, as it covers some more fundamental concepts than in the second text. Recommended.