How We Got Here: GotW and PeerDirect

The C++ Guru of the Week series has come a long way. GotW was originally created late in 1996 to provide interesting challenges and ongoing education for our own development team here at PeerDirect. I wrote it to provide an entertaining learning tool, including rants on things like the proper use of inheritance and exception safety. As time went on, I also used it as a means to provide our team with visibility to the changes being made at the C++ standards meetings. Since then, GotW has been made available to the general C++ public as a regular feature of the Internet newsgroup comp.lang.c++.moderated, where you can find each new issue's questions and answers (and a lot of interesting discussion).

Using C++ well is important at PeerDirect for many of the same reasons it's important in your company, if perhaps to achieve different goals. We happen to build systems software梖or distributed databases and database replication梚n which enterprise issues such as reliability, safety, portability, efficiency, and many others are make-or-break concerns. The software we write needs to be able to be ported across various compilers and operating systems; it needs to be safe and robust in the presence of database transaction deadlocks and communications interruptions and programming exceptions; and it's used by customers to manage tiny databases sitting inside smart cards and pop machines or on PalmOS and WinCE devices, through to departmental Windows NT and Linux and Solaris servers, through to massively parallel Oracle back-ends for Web servers and data warehouses梬ith the same software, the same reliability, the same code. Now that's a portability and reliability challenge, as we creep up on half a million tight, noncomment lines of code.

To those of you who have been reading Guru of the Week on the Internet for the past few years, I have a couple of things to say:

• Thank you for your interest, support, e-mails, kudos, corrections, comments, criticisms, questions梐nd especially for your requests for the GotW series to be assembled in book form. Here it is; I hope you enjoy it.

• This book contains a lot more than you ever saw on the Internet.

Exceptional C++ is not just a cut-and-paste of stale GotW issues that are already floating out there somewhere in cyberspace. All the problems and solutions have been considerably revised and reworked梖or example, Items 8 through 17 on exception safety originally appeared as a single GotW puzzle and have now become an in-depth, 10-part miniseries. Each problem and solution has been examined to bring it up to date with the then-changing, and now official, C++ standard.

So, if you've been a regular reader of GotW before, there's a lot that's new here for you. To all faithful readers, thanks again, and I hope this material will help you continue to hone and expand your software engineering and C++ programming skills.