Organization

The main content of the book is divided into six parts. Each part is comprised of an introduction, followed by between five and seven chapters, each of which is further divided into relevant sections.

Inspired by the title of the book, I try to highlight the actual imperfections, so you will find them throughout the text. In the early parts of the book, the imperfections come thick and fast, reflecting the relatively straightforward nature both of the imperfections themselves and of their solutions. Each subsection refers to a particular feature of the language and generally describes an imperfection. Wherever possible, a specific technique and/or software technology is presented which either answers the problem, or provides the developer with control over it. As the book progresses, the imperfections become less discrete and more significant, with correspondingly lengthy and detailed discussions.

The book does not follow the modern "buffet" format, nor does it have a single contiguous thread requiring it to be read from front to back. Having said that, most of the later chapters are described in terms of, and will occasionally be built on, the content of earlier ones so, unless you're feeling perverse, you'll be better off reading it in order. However, once you've read it once, you should be able to come back to any point for reference without needing to read the whole thing again. Within the chapters, sections generally follow a sequential format, so I would recommend that you read each chapter in that vein.

In terms of difficulty, it's certainly the case that Parts One through Four follow a progression from reasonably straightforward to seriously demanding.^[3] Although Parts Five and Six rely on some of the material from Parts Three and Four, they are considerably less challenging, and you should feel yourself cruising along to the appendixes.

^[3] Parts of Parts Three and Four hurt my brain still.

Following the main content of the book are four short appendixes. Appendix A details the compilers and libraries used in the research for Imperfect C++. Appendix B regales you with some of the slack-jawed blunders of a young C++ engineer, taking his first steps in the land of the double crosses. Appendix C describes the Arturius project, a free, open-source compiler-multiplexer, which is also included on the CD. Appendix D describes the contents of the CD-ROM.

I have a very consistent, perhaps strict, coding style; you may well call it pedantic. Former colleagues and users of my libraries have certainly done so. But I do it the way I do because there are no unanswered questions as to where everything goes, which means I can come back to it years later and dive straight in. The downside is that I need a twenty-one-inch monitor and an industrial-strength laser printer.

In order to minimize the effects of my coding style on the readability of Imperfect C++, I've taken a few liberties in the code examples presented throughout the book. You'll see a lot of ellipses (...) in the examples, and this generally means something that's either been covered in a previous related example, or reflects boilerplate code that we all use (e.g., the proscription of methods from client code access—see section 2.2). Only the aspects of style that have manifest effects on reliability are discussed, in Chapter 17.^[4]

^[4] If you absolutely must sample the voluminous splendor of the rest of my coding style, there's plenty of exemplifying code in the libraries provided on the CD.