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C++ Templates: The Complete Guide

Format: Hardcover
Author: David Vandevoorde
ReleaseDate: 12 November, 2002
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Rating:

A very useful, easy to use book on templates!
Anyone with 15-minutes to spend can immediately pick up the book and begin writing their own templates in C++ even though this is not a traditional "step-by-step" learn-everything-in-a-day kind of book. This book is a natural for anyone who needs or wants to hone their skills using C++ Templates. The authors are recognized as experts on the topic in the C++ world. More importantly, they convey templates without the complexity perceived by the syntax that seems to scare people away from templates early on. . . while presenting templates in their full syntactic glory albeit with an easy, thorough and thoughful introduction that appropriately paces rather than brain-dumps.

I bought this book for the community bookshelf of our C++ programming department, but particularly for one colleague who struggled with the notion of using templates at all, much less, effectively. After a couple of hours, he was pestering everyone about all of the bits of code that we should be converting to templates. Viola, a success story!

The book very quickly gets to the point of dealing with templates. The first few chapters do away with unnecessary fluff and give you the tools to understand and implement templates. The book is amazingly concise without compromising the shared benefit of years of experience contained within by its authors.

Getting past the basics, the authors give us their insight into more details regarding templates and their use--both in code and even by convention in discourse regarding templates. One easily sees that their intent is in sharing the truth of templates in this book.

This is undoubtedly going to be the defacto-standard for books on the topic of C++ Templates.
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everything you need to master c++ templates
. whatever writes on the back cover is absolutely valid (this is usually not the case with such books).

Nice, but may not be a good first choice.
It will tell you everything about templates, both every detail at the language level and everything interesting someone has done with templates in the last 10 years. This book is encyclopedic. It even tells you furture changes that might happen to templates in 4-8 years when the C++ standard is revised. This last is useful to know, to keep in mind what templates cannot do, as sometimes it feels like templates can do anything. Though the writing is somewhat dry, it is always clean and to-the-point, and the authors have the highest reputations for accuracy and expertise.

The entire last 200 pages of this 500 page book, from Metaprograms on through the entire section on Advanced Applications, describe things software developers should look to libraries for. Smart pointers, generic functors, metaprogramming, etc. , are all weak without a supporting library, and there are good libraries freely available. The book gives references to them, which is good, but it mainly tells you how to write similar things from scratch, which is somewhat useless except to the few hundred living people who write the libraries. Unless you were curious, that is.

The only technique I will be using myself in production code, as opposed to getting from quality libraries, is traits and policies. The book does spend 40 pages covering this, and it touches all the bases, but _Modern C++ Design_ has a much fuller coverage, which this book admits at the end of its section.

Although this book is excellent, and you will eventually want it to reach "guru" status as your understanding of templates grows, you may want _Modern C++ Design_ first, if your present interest is mainly in policy-based design and you prefer to start with applications rather than fundamentals. You may also want to consider the new _C++ Template Metaprogramming_ if your present interest is metaprogramming. But if you are looking for a solid, general grounding in everything templates can do and have been used to do, _C++ Templates: the Complete Guide_ is exactly what you are looking for.
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