Epilogue
And that's it! Our journey is over, for the moment at least. If you've found it easy, then I hope that reflects the effort my editors and reviewers have expended in turning my interminable blither into something readable. If you've found it hard, then at least I hope you've enjoyed yourself along the way. In either case, you can take some light relief in Appendix B, when I get all confessional and show you some of my most heinous gaffes.
I hope that you'll take three things from this book:
That C++ is not perfect, but it is very powerful. Just selecting a few of the items at random—portable vtables, properties, ranges, true-typedefs, type tunnelling—we can plainly see some of the immense intrinsic power. For all its faults, there is clearly a long way to go before we exhaust the possibilities of this remarkable language. That, for just about any problem, there exists a solution that is simple, powerful, efficient, flexible, or robust, or some combination thereof. The challenge to the Imperfect Practitioner is in choosing the right combinations. That you can, by using appropriate discipline, libraries, and techniques, truly make the compiler your batman, and avoid falling afoul of the majority of C++'s imperfections. For the remainder, you'll just have to read more (books), write more (code), and build your experience. That's what the rest of us are doing.
And for those few crazy critters who might just want more...
Matthew Wilson will return in Extended STL.
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