Bill Weinman

The subtitle for this book is: Leverage (sic) the latest features of the STL to solve real-world problems. Inside, the book says that it is for "intermediate to advanced" C++ programmers.

However, perhaps half of the book isn't about the latest (i.e., C++20) features at all, but features that any intermediate programmer would already know from earlier versions of the standard.

As to the actual content:

I found there to be far too many errors, typographical and otherwise.

Examples contain a lot of irrelevant code that has nothing to do with the feature being explicated.

On at least one occasion, after creating a tortuous example of ranges; the author presents a pre-C++20 solution that is far simpler. Indeed, at no point does the author provide any kind of argument as to why one would want to use ranges/views in preference to the traditional methods of processing containers.

The only time that efficiency is discussed is in the chapter on concurrency and parallelism. So one reaches the end of the book without any idea as to whether a particular feature is more efficient than older mechanisms for obtaining the same result (this is, of course, a particularly important omission in the case of ranges/views).

On the few occasions that the author does time code, he guesses as to the reason for differences in execution time, instead of examining the assembly code via Compiler Explorer or some such tool.

Oddly, the example use of parameter packs I thought extremely advanced, given the lightweight nature of the rest of the book -- and has very little to help the reader understand the code. I freely admit that I certainly didn't understand it, and I've been using C++ since the days of cfront.

Nico Josuttis's book on C++20 isn't out yet, but when it is -- and that should happen soon -- I expect it to be vastly superior to this one (although likely with some quirky English and its own share of typographical errors, if his other books are any guide).… (mehr)