Software "style" is about finding the perfect balance between overhead and functionality... elegance and maintainability... flexibility and excess. In Exceptional C++ Style, legendary C++ guru Herb Sutter presents 40 new programming scenarios designed to analyze not only the what but the why and help you find just the right balance in your software.

Organized around practical problems and solutions, this book offers new insight into crucial C++ details and interrelationships, and new strategies for today's key C++ programming techniques--including generic programming, STL, exception safety, and more. You'll find answers to questions like:

• What can you learn about library design from the STL itself?
• How do you avoid making templated code needlessly non-generic?
• Why shouldn't you specialize function templates? What should you do instead?
• How does exception safety go beyond try and catch statements?
• Should you use exception specifications, or not?
• When and how should you "leak" the private parts of a class?
• How do you make classes safer for versioning?
• What's the real memory cost of using standard containers?
• How can using const really optimize your code?
• How does writing inline affect performance?
• When does code that looks wrong actually compile and run perfectly, and why should you care?
• What's wrong with the design of std::string?

Exceptional C++ Style will help you design, architect, and code with style--and achieve greater robustness and performance in all your C++ software.

C++ guru Herb Sutter provides a thorough and pragmatic understanding of the language while showing how to write exceptional code in C++.

• Organized in a practical problem-and-solution format, this book provides successful strategies for solving real-world problems in C++.
• Latest addition to Bjarne Stroustrup's respected C++ In-Depth Series.
• Sutter is a leading authority on C++ software development; he is chair of the C++ standards committee and is an architect and C++ evangelist at Microsoft.

Exceptional C++ Style continues where Exceptional C++ and More Exceptional C++ left off. This book follows in the tradition of the first two: It delivers new material, organized in bite-sized Items and grouped into themed sections. Readers of the first two books will find some familiar section themes, now including new material, such as exception safety, generic programming, and optimization and memory management techniques. The books overlap in structure and theme, not in content. This book continues the strong emphasis on generic programming and on using the C++ standard library effectively, including coverage of important template and generic programming techniques. Sutter's goal for this third and final book in his set is to present case studies that pull together themes from the previous books. This book also covers important points presented at the C++ Standard Committee where corrections to the Standard have been discussed and accepted.