Acknowledgments

In just about any book you'll ever pick up there are effusive acknowledgments to family and friends, and I can promise you they are heartfelt. Writing a book cannot be done without a huge amount of support.

Thanks to mum and Suzanne for enduring, financing, and raising the overstuffed cuckoo, who finally flitted the nest, to the other side of the world, at the overripe age of twenty-seven. Thanks to mum and Robert for helping said cuckoo and his family during a challenging but eventually fruitful couple of years. A special thanks goes to Robert for helping keep the mind at ease at a couple of important points during this time.

Thanks to Piker, for filling in the gaps in the extended family, and giving more than his share of babysitting, encouragement, and free lunches. Similar thanks to Dazzle, for always telling me he had ultimate confidence in me, and for tearing himself away from all those fascinating DBA-guru activities to put in a stalwart effort in helping with many of the boring review tasks; he'll never look at another Perl or Python script quite the same way again! Grunts of gratitude to Besso, for always showing interest, undue pride, and an encouraging perspective on my plans. And thanks to Al and Cynth (the in-laws!) for many free dinners and a limitless supply of free gourmet chocolate. (Now, where's that bike?...)

Essential thanks are due 808 State, Aim, Barry White, Billy Bragg, De La Soul, Fatboy Slim, George Michael, Level 42, Rush, Seal, Stevie Wonder, and The Brand New Heavies, without whom I could not possibly have survived being in "the bubble" for a year and a half.

And most important, thanks to my beautiful wife, Sarah, who managed to suppress her reasonable concerns and doubts to present an almost unblemished veneer of support and confidence. A true star!

I'd like to recognize some remarkable people who've influenced my education and career thus far. Thanks are due (Professor) Bob Cryan for recognizing a fellow congenital overachiever and offering him the chance to dodge work (and ride his bike) for a further three years in postgraduate study.

I'd like to thank Richard McCormack for making me see beauty in the efficiency of code, not just elegance of concept. These days I'm sometimes accused of being too focused on efficiency; I say blame Richard! Also, Graham Jones ("Dukey") for set -o vi, and for six crazy months of friendship and good fun. Unrepeatable stuff!

Thanks also to Leigh and Scott Perry for introducing me to their "bolt-in" concept and other excellent techniques. They may wish to demur and instead confess to unabashed autogeneration of 16MB+ DLLs and a lamentable recent obsession with languages that run in virtual machines; I couldn't possibly comment.

Special thanks to Andy Thurling who showed generous faith in my potential when I hit the job market with Ph.D. in hand, and a level of software engineering skill in inverse proportion to my estimation thereof.^[6] Andy taught me probably the single greatest lesson for anyone in this wonderful but scary profession: that we're all just "skegging it out."^[7] Chuck Allison puts it more accessibly, with the ancient American Indian wisdom: "He who learns from one who is learning drinks from a running stream."

^[6] I didn't even know the difference between real mode and protected mode!

^[7] This is a North Yorkshire term meaning "making the best of what information you have at the time."

Crucial to the success of any book are the publishers, reviewers, and advisors. Thanks to my editor, Peter Gordon, who encouraged, calmed, and contained an ebullient and bullish author on the tortuously slow emotional rollercoaster that is a first book. Thanks also to Peter's able assistant Bernard Gaffney, who managed the process and endured multiple e-mails a day with patience and restraint, as well as the rest of the production and marketing staff at Addison-Wesley: Amy Fleischer, Chanda Leary-Coutu, Heather Mullane, Jacquelyn Doucette, Jennifer Andrews, Kim Boedigheimer, and Kristy Hart. Heartfelt thanks (and apologies) to my project manager, Jessica Balch, of Pine Tree Composition, who had the questionable pleasure of sifting through the text and weeding out all my poor grammar, weak attempts at humor, and British-English spelling (a myriad "ise"s instead of "ize"s). Also a special note of thanks to Debbie Lafferty for encouragement when Imperfect C++ was nothing but a catchy phrase I dreamt up one night in 2002.

Thanks to my loyal band of reviewers—Chuck Allison, Dave Brooks, Darren Lynch, Duane Yates, Eugene Gershnik, Gary Pennington, George Frasier, Greg Peet, John Torjo, Scott Patterson, and Walter Bright—without whom I'd have a flat face from having fallen on it too many times. Some made me laugh, others made me question the sanity of the enterprise, but the feedback helped improve the final result no end. What a wonderful world we live in where friendships with people from a wide spectrum of countries, most of whom I've never physically met, can engender this level of helpfulness. Bravo!

Thanks also to the Addison-Wesley reviewers—Dan Saks, JC van Winkel, Jay Roy, Ron McCarty, Justin Shaw, Nevin Liber, and Steve Clamage—whose feedback was crucial in bringing the book in under 1000 pages, and not riddled with turgid prose and careless mistakes. Having been on the other side of the writing/review process, I know what it takes to do a thorough review, and I really appreciate the efforts.

Thanks to Peter Dimov, for graciously allowing me to use his superb quote in Chapter 26, and for providing some excellent feedback on the chapters of Part Five. Thanks to Kevlin Henney for casting his eye over Chapter 19 and some interesting discussions on smart casts, to Joe Goodman for helping me sift through my original dross to present a decent discussion of C++ ABIs (Chapters 7 and 8), and to Thorsten Ottosen for performing similar denonsensisination duties on the Design by Contract aspects of Chapter 1.

Special thanks to Chuck Allison, Herb Sutter, Joe Casad, John Dorsey, and Jon Erickson for great support and encouragement in a variety of activities over the last few years.

Thanks to Bjarne Stroustrup for subtle encouragements, and a little history lesson here and there. Oh, and for inventing this marvelous language in the first place!

Thanks to Walter Bright, for constantly improving his excellent Digital Mars C/C++ compiler throughout the writing of the book, for having such an amenable nature in the face of a constant barrage from the world's least patient man, and for graciously involving me in the D language development, which has been one of the many sources of inspiration for this book. Similar thanks to Greg Comeau, albeit that he didn't have much improving to do with the Comeau compiler: it is the most conformant in the business! As well as being great and responsive vendors, both these excellent fellows have provided repeated encouragement, advice, and input on a whole range of issues.

Thanks to CMP publishing, for letting me use material from some of my articles in the book, and include several original articles on the CD (see Appendix D).

Thanks to Borland, CodePlay, Digital Mars, Intel, Metrowerks, and Microsoft for providing me with their compilers to support my research, writing, and open-source library activities.

Special thanks to Digital Mars, Intel, and Watcom for granting permission to include their compilers on the CD (see Appendix D). And Greg Peet deserves several manly slaps on the back for his invaluable help in designing the CD and helping me with its contents.

Thanks to the readers of C/C++ User's Journal, Dr. Dobb's Journal, BYTE, and Windows Developer Network who have been kind enough to provide feedback and support for my articles and columns.

Similar thanks are also due to the C++ community at large and the kind people who give of themselves on various C++-related newsgroups (see Appendix A). These include Attila Feher, Carl Young, Daniel Spangenberg, Eelis van der Weegen, Gabriel Dos Reis, Igor Tandetnik, John Potter, Massimiliano Alberti, Michal Necasek, Richard Smith, Ron Crane, Steven Keuchel, Thomas Richter, "tom_usenet," and probably a whole lot more whom I've missed. Particular thanks to Ilya Minkov for putting in a request for me to implement Properties for C++ in the STLSoft libraries, something I'd not previously considered. Without that suggestion one of my favorite techniques (see Chapter 35) would never have been.

And finally, thanks to all the STLSoft users, without whose feedback many of the features of the library would not be, and parts of this book would have been all the harder to research and to write.