What I Assume You Know

Unless one wants to write a very large book, a good degree of knowledge must be assumed. It would be churlish to stipulate that you have read a precise set of texts, but I do assume that you have knowledge and experience sufficient to be comfortable with most of the concepts contained in Scott Meyer's Effective C++ and Herb Sutter's Exceptional C++ series. I also assume that you have a copy of the language bible: Bjarne Stroustrup's The C++ Programming Language. I don't assume you've read Stroustrup cover to cover—I haven't (yet)—but you should use it as the ultimate reference for the language, as there's a gem on every other page.

Imperfect C++ contains a fair amount of template code—which modern C++ book doesn't? —but I do not assume that you're a guru^[2] or have advanced knowledge of meta-programming. Nonetheless, it's probably best if you're at least familiar with using templates, such as those that form the popular parts of the C++ standard library. I have tried to keep the template use down to a reasonable level, but it has to be acknowledged that the support for templates is the very thing that allows C++ to "self-repair," and it is that, therefore, which largely accounts for the existence of this book.

^[2] There are several books listed in the Bibliography that can help you on the long journey to becoming one, if you're willing to invest the effort.

Since flexibility and practicality are big things with me, this is not a book whose code can only be used with a small minority of "bleeding edge" compilers; nearly everything in the book will work with just about any reasonably modern compiler (see Appendix A). Certainly there are good freely available compilers, and you can have confidence that your compiler will support the code.

Wherever possible, I've avoided reference to particular operating environments, libraries, and technologies. However, I do touch on several, so it would be useful, though by no means essential, to have some grounding in some of the following: COM and/or CORBA, dynamic libraries (UNIX and/or Win32), STL, threads (POSIX and/or Win32), UNIX, and Win32. The bibliography contains numerous references to good books on these and other subjects. It would also be useful to have familiarity with more than one machine architecture, though again this is not essential.

Since C remains the lingua franca of interlanguage and operating system development, it continues to be an extremely important language. Notwithstanding that this is a book about C++, there are many areas in which the common heritage of C and C++ comes into focus, and I make no apologies for addressing both languages in those circumstances. Indeed, as we see in Part Two, we need to fall back on C to support several advanced uses of C++.

There's one important assumption about you that I am making. I assume that you believe in doing quality work, and are motivated to finding new ways in which you can achieve this. This book cannot claim to be the sole source of such new ways of approaching C++. Rather it represents a practical, and in some cases heretical, look at the problems we all encounter with the language, and can at best form a part of your library of essential texts. The ultimate responsibility is yours. All the rest is just getting the best tools to back you up.