Effective C++11: Background

I've mentioned in some earlier posts that I plan to start writing a new book, Effective C++11.  The purpose of this post is to tell you a little bit about it. Lest there be confusion, let me emphasize that there is no book yet. If everything falls into place the way I hope it will, there will be a book about 10 months from now. If. I'm not making any promises.

If you're looking for information on the content of Effective C+11, this is the wrong place to seek it. I had originally planned to include a content summary, but once I'd written the background information that follows, I realized that the post was already too long. So the content information will go in a separate post.

People have been asking me to write Effective C++11 since before it would have been possible to give it that title. I started getting requests when the new version of the language, then known as C++0x, was still under development. I had a ready reply for such requests, aside from my considerable reluctance to write a book about a language that was still in flux. (Poor Anthony Williams' C++ Concurrency in Action remained in publishing purgatory for nearly three years, because he had the misfortune to publish an "early access" digital draft two years before the C++ Standard it corresponded to settled down. As a result, he had to keep revising the draft as updates to the emerging Standard were made, and that cannot have been fun. The result was worth both his effort and our patience, because the book is excellent. I strongly encourage you to consider buying it. I have. But I'm really glad I didn't have to go through the ordeal of writing it.)

My ready reply to requests to whip out Effective C++Whatever was that it's not possible to describe how to use a technology effectively until the community has enough experience with the technology to know what truly works and what doesn't. We'd all like to skip over experiencing the disappointment of what seem like great ideas that fail to pan out. We'd like to instantly come up with the nifty applications of features in ways nobody had foreseen. That'd be great. But as far as I know, the only way to separate the effective uses of C++11 from the ineffective ones is to try as many things as we can, then see what ends up in which pile. That takes time.

In truth, most people didn't ask for Effective C++Whatever. They asked for a new edition of Effective C++. It was the obvious thing to ask for, and it was the obvious thing for me to write, but it presented me with a problem I didn't know how to overcome.

The problem was (and is) that I constrain myself to books with no more than 300 pages. There is some wiggle room in that constraint, because I don't count front matter (preface and tables of contents, etc.--generally stuff numbered using Roman numerals), and if I had to, I'd probably be willing to ignore pages comprising the index. Nevertheless, my goal is to avoid producing a book with a page number higher than 300. The current edition of Effective C++ (available at fine bookstores everywhere, not to mention at a variety of illegal download sites, sigh) has, if you ignore the appendices and the index, a maximum page number of 272. That doesn't leave a lot of room for new material. And, as I've blogged about elsewhere, the material that's currently in the book remains largely valid under C++11. I didn't want to jettison a lot of useful material that's as valid under C++11 as under C++98, but I'm serious about the advantages of comparatively short books, so I didn't want to exceed the 300-page barrier, either.

The page limit problem held me back at least as much as the lack-of-experience problem. I knew that time would address the experience issue, but 300 pages wasn't going to get any bigger, no matter how long I waited. (Yes, I think like a programmer, so I couldn't help but toy with the ideas of playing games with smaller font sizes, narrower margins, page numbering using bases other than 10, and eliminating page numbers entirely. But cheating's less fun when the rules you're evading are the ones you made up in the first place.)

Last year, I experienced the proverbial brainsquall, and I realized that if most of Effective C++ remains valid under C++11, the solution is to not write a new edition of that book, but to write a new book. A book devoted to making effective use of the features unique to C++11. A book to complement Effective C++. That's my plan for Effective C++11:  to write a book describing how to make effective use of the features and capabilities in C++11 that are not present in C++98. A book with content entirely separate from my other C++ books and also largely separate from the content of my C++11 Overview Materials. In other words, all new stuff.  New from me, anyway.

The page constraint was thus vanquished, and experience with C++11 was slowly piling up on the information superhighway, but I had another concern. When I wrote my other books, I knew how they'd be published: as one or two colors of ink on more or less white paper of a fixed size. But the future of publishing was clearly digital, and I didn't know what it meant to produce a manuscript that should ultimately look good and be useful as both ink on paper and pixels on a screen, especially when some screens were monochrome (e.g., Kindle), and screen sizes varied from those of smart phones to those of UHDTV-capable monitors. During 2008-2010, I spent some time agonizing over this issue in my blog for Fastware!, a book that never came to be. I even gave a talk at a publishing conference about my concerns.

To be honest, I'm still not sure how to approach writing a manuscript when the result is to be published on multiple platforms, but analysis paralysis loses its appeal after a while, so I finally decided that if I don't know what the right way is, I might as well take a guess and see what happens. Exactly what that will mean in practice, I'm not sure, but my current plan is to write using Microsoft Word using lots of styles, and my assumption is that whatever manuscript format looks to be "right" when I have a manuscript ready to go, somebody will be able to figure out how to translate what I have in Word into that format.

Okay, having slogged through my whining about lack of experience, page limits, and manuscript preparation, you'd like to think I'll finally do something with a payoff for you. Something like offer some details about what will be in the book.  That I will. In my next post, which I plan to start writing immediately after publishing this one. Stay tuned.

Scott