Appendix D. The CD

When the publisher suggested I provide a CD along with the book, I had a sinking feeling. Now I'd have to show in full the techniques I'd merely described snapshots of in the book. People would be able to see my code in all its majesty, or conspicuous lack thereof, and there'd be no hiding behind "for brevity I have elided the remainder of the class" and similar statements.

Having thought about it for a while, though, I decided that it was actually a great opportunity. There are several advantages to me, the author, and to you, the reader. The CD contains space for me to include libraries, sample projects, the full suite of test programs used in the book research, some free C/C++ compilers, the Arturius project (see Appendix C), and several of my published articles that detail issues that only briefly touched on in the book.

Bearing in mind that the preparation of the CD will happen a month or two after the final version of the book, it is my intention that it will contain the following items:

• The Arturius compiler multiplexer— See Appendix C.

• Compilers— If you've currently only got access to one compiler, you'll be a bit stumped in testing out Arturius. Thankfully, several vendors have agreed to provide free and/or time-limited versions of their compilers, so you can get busy subjecting your code to the prognostications of a collective. I've also provided links to other useful free compilers that you can download.

• Libraries— Many of the components described in the book are gleaned from existing libraries—particularly the Boost and STLSoft libraries—so they're included here in their latest forms, along with distributions for some other libraries with which I've been involved (see Appendix A). I've also included links to other libraries that I think are worth your looking into.

• Articles— A selection of articles, kindly provided by CMP publishing, that expand on material covered in the book.

• Example and test programs— The full suite of test programs and makefiles used in the research for the book. This code is not pretty, but it exercises the various topics covered.

• Tools and scripts— Miscellaneous system/development tools and code manipulation scripts.

Please see the index.html in the root directory of the CD for the final details of the contents.