Thursday, December 16, 1999

October MIND Article is now On-Line

Well isn't it just like Microsoft to make a liar out of me? I got word
today that my October MIND article is now fully available on-line. You can
get to it at http://www.microsoft.com/Mind/1099/browsing/browsing.htm.

Scott

Wednesday, December 15, 1999

Updated errata lists; Article stuff; Effective STL Seminar

Three topics:

1. UPDATED ERRATA LISTS for Effective C++, More Effective C++, and
the Effective C++ CD

2. ARTICLE STUFF, including imminent on-line availablity of my October
DDJ article and advance notice of my upcoming CUJ article.

3. ADVANCE NOTICE OF MY EFFECTIVE STL SEMINAR, to be held in Portland,
Oregon, in June, 2000.


UPDATED ERRATA LISTS:
---------------------

On the off chance the world fails to end at midnight on December 31, I
updated my publications' errata lists for the new millennium.

- The errata list for Effective C++ is still at
http://www.aristeia.com/BookErrata/ec++2e-errata.html. New entries are
dated 5/24/99 or later.

- The errata list for More Effective C++ remains at
http://www.aristeia.com/BookErrata/mec++-errata.html. New entries are
dated 10/8/99 or later.

- The errata list for the Effective C++ CD continues to dwell at
http://www.aristeia.com/BookErrata/cd1e-errata.html. New entries are
dated 7/6/99 or later.

I asked AW to update the auto_ptr page that they maintain, but I have no
idea how long it will take them to do it. Fortunately, the change is quite
small. This is what I sent them:

At the MEC++ auto_ptr update page
(http://www.awl.com/cseng/titles/0-201-63371-X/auto_ptr.html), one
paragraph reads as follows:

As it turns out, the dust hasn't quite settled on auto_ptr, because some
minor errors have been detected in the standard's specification: it
doesn't quite say what the standardization committee wanted it to
say. When everything is taken care of, I'll update this page again to let
you know the details.

I'd appreciate it if you'd add the following sentence to the end of the
above paragraph:

(If you just can't wait that long, search for "auto_ptr" in the href="http://anubis.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/lwg-active.html">Active
Issues List for the C++ Standard Library
.)

Finally, I added email from Bill Wade to the M27 page (it's devoted to
determining whether an object is on the heap). That page remains at
http://www.aristeia.com/BookErrata/M27Comments.html.


ARTICLE STUFF:
--------------

DDJ has generously agreed to make my October article on operator->*
available on-line sometime in the near future. I'll let you know the URL
when they tell me what it is. This is very nice of the DDJ people, because
they don't generally make their articles available for free, so I hope
you'll send them fan mail. In the future, I expect all my magazine
articles to be available on-line a couple of months after they appear in
print, because I'm making that a standard condition when I submit things
for publication.

I've asked the MIND people to make my October article from there available
on-line, too, but I haven't heard back from them, and MS is not known for
its cooperative nature on these matters. Don't get your hopes up.

I'll have a new article in the February CUJ (unless it gets bumped to a
different issue between now and then). I'll use this mailing list to let
you know when the article is out, but let me say right now that I think the
article is one of the most important things I've written in a long time.
This is how it opens:

I'll start with the punchline: If you're writing a function that can be
implemented as either a member or as a non-friend non-member, you should
prefer to implement it as a non-member function. That decision
*increases* class encapsulation. When you think encapsulation, you
should think non-member functions.

I expect this to drop some jaws, but of course, that's the point :-)


EFFECTIVE STL SEMINAR:
----------------------

Recently, I've been looking into the STL in preparation for what I hope
will become a book on the topic written at the level of Effective C++. The
working title is -- duh -- "Effective STL". Yes, you heard it here first.
No, I don't know when the book will be done :-)

Regardless of whether the book comes to fruition, I'm planning to conduct a
hands-on seminar on effective use of the STL in Portland, Oregon, in June
of 2000, probably during the week of June 5-9. The basic idea will be a
combination of lectures and hands-on labs led by me, with the focus being
how to *use* the STL instead of dwelling on the tedium behind things like
iterator categories and what it means to be a model of EqualityComparable.
As in my other C++ books, the material will be broken down into bite-sized
guidelines, and I'm hopeful that this format will be as useful to C++
programmers using the STL as it has been for the non-STL parts of the
language.

I'll have details about the seminar (length, dates, cost, prerequisites,
etc.) in a mailing in the first half of January, but for the time being,
please try to set aside the time and budget to join me in June to learn how
to make *effective* use of the most revolutionary library I have ever seen.
As I mentioned, the seminar is tentatively scheduled to take place the week
of June 5-9, but if you have strong feelings about which week in June it
should occur, send your thoughts to Nancy Pastrano
(NPastrano@TrekServices.com); she'll be handling the logistics for the
event. Nancy's help leaves me time to mull over the significance of the
fact that the non-member algorithm "find" and the member algorithm "find"
don't generally behave the same way, so replacing one with the other does
more than just affect performance...

Scott