Saturday, July 10, 2004
Back to reading some good technical stuff
For the past few days I have not been able to add new blog entries. The other day there was a posting in the newsgroup of our company that blog writing is the "IN" thing :)
The books I had ordered a month back have finally been delivered. Actually it’s been over a week that the consignment arrived. There are three new books to my collection:
1. The C++ Object model - Stanley Lippman.
2. C++ gems.
3. More C++ gems.
I had read the first book almost 5 years back from my college library. It is an amazing box. Stanley gives an insight in to the C++ object model and how things get done/generated behind the scene in C++. This helps the programmer figure out the performance costs associated with using certain language constructs like virtual functions or virtual base classes. Also, the discussion about when the compiler generates a default constructor, for the class you have written, is pretty elaborate.
Though I am yet to read the last two books (should happen in about another 6-8 months), I must say that they are simply amazing. I have finished about 3 chapters from the "C++ gems" book. There is striking resemblance to "Programming pearls" - Jon Bentley, which is collection of papers/essays/case studies. Programming pearls is another book that I had read about 5+ years back, while preparing for the campus interviews. And you know what, it helped me crack, not the Oyster, but an important question poised in the interview (Maximum sum found in any contiguous sub vector in an input array).
While we are on the subject, if you are working on a large C++ project, then recommended reading is "Large Scale C++ Software Design" - Lakos.
The problems faced while working on a large project are of a different nature and one needs to focus on physical project organization (files, directories, etc.) in addition to logical project organization (classes, inheritance hierarchies etc). These physical organization issues affect your compile/build times (matters a whole lot for a large C++ project, since you don't want the whole project to be re-compiled due to a header file change!) and also drive the logical organization of things. The book describes these problem in great details and techniques (PIMPL idiom, insulation etc.) to address the problems.
Finally more recommended reading that can be immediately put to use, are the Effective C++ and More Effective C++ books by Scott Meyers.
Happy reading for these bed time story books :)
The books I had ordered a month back have finally been delivered. Actually it’s been over a week that the consignment arrived. There are three new books to my collection:
1. The C++ Object model - Stanley Lippman.
2. C++ gems.
3. More C++ gems.
I had read the first book almost 5 years back from my college library. It is an amazing box. Stanley gives an insight in to the C++ object model and how things get done/generated behind the scene in C++. This helps the programmer figure out the performance costs associated with using certain language constructs like virtual functions or virtual base classes. Also, the discussion about when the compiler generates a default constructor, for the class you have written, is pretty elaborate.
Though I am yet to read the last two books (should happen in about another 6-8 months), I must say that they are simply amazing. I have finished about 3 chapters from the "C++ gems" book. There is striking resemblance to "Programming pearls" - Jon Bentley, which is collection of papers/essays/case studies. Programming pearls is another book that I had read about 5+ years back, while preparing for the campus interviews. And you know what, it helped me crack, not the Oyster, but an important question poised in the interview (Maximum sum found in any contiguous sub vector in an input array).
While we are on the subject, if you are working on a large C++ project, then recommended reading is "Large Scale C++ Software Design" - Lakos.
The problems faced while working on a large project are of a different nature and one needs to focus on physical project organization (files, directories, etc.) in addition to logical project organization (classes, inheritance hierarchies etc). These physical organization issues affect your compile/build times (matters a whole lot for a large C++ project, since you don't want the whole project to be re-compiled due to a header file change!) and also drive the logical organization of things. The book describes these problem in great details and techniques (PIMPL idiom, insulation etc.) to address the problems.
Finally more recommended reading that can be immediately put to use, are the Effective C++ and More Effective C++ books by Scott Meyers.
Happy reading for these bed time story books :)
# posted by Paresh Borkar @ 10:50 AM 
