Book Report: New Title, New TOC, New Sample Item

The purpose of this post is to update you on the status of the book I'm working on. It includes a new working title, a revised table of contents and a new draft sample Item.

Thanks to comments on my blog post asking for suggestions about how to name the book, I've changed the working title to Effective Modern C++, and I've accustomed myself to distinguishing the abbreviation EMC++ (the current book) from MEC++ (More Effective C++). Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed that the new title has already appeared on a talk I'll be giving in June at the Norwegian Developers Conference.

I recently finished the 32nd Item for the book, thus giving me drafts of five full chapters. The math still shows that about 40 Items will fit in the book's allotted 300 pages, so yesterday I took a hatchet to the prospective table of contents and chopped the number of Items down from 51 to 41. (Why 41? Because I have a feeling that one of the Items I've written will eventually get jettisoned as not being important enough to make the final cut.)  Here's the current draft TOC. The chapters I've written are 1-4 and 6 (i.e., chapters 5 and 7 remain on my todo list).

Chapter 1 Deducing Types
  Item 1: Understand template type deduction.
  Item 2: Understand decltype.
  Item 3: Know how to view deduced types.

Chapter 2 auto
  Item 4: Prefer auto to explicit type declarations.
  Item 5: Remember that in variable declarations, auto + { expr }
          yields a std::initializer_list.
  Item 6: Be aware of the typed initializer idiom.

Chapter 3 From C++98 to C++11 and C++14
  Item 7: Distinguish () and {} when creating objects.
  Item 8: Prefer nullptr to 0 and NULL.
  Item 9: Prefer alias declarations to typedefs.
  Item 10: Prefer scoped enums to unscoped enums.
  Item 11: Prefer deleted functions to private undefined ones.
  Item 12: Declare overriding functions override.
  Item 13: Prefer const_iterators to iterators.
  Item 14: Use constexpr whenever possible.
  Item 15: Make const member functions thread-safe.
  Item 16: Declare functions noexcept whenever possible.
  Item 17: Consider pass by value for cheap-to-move parameters that
           are always copied.
  Item 18: Consider emplacement instead of insertion.
  Item 19: Understand special member function generation.

Chapter 4 Smart Pointers
  Item 20: Use std::unique_ptr for exclusive-ownership resource
           management.
  Item 21: Use std::shared_ptr for shared-ownership resource
           management.
  Item 22: Use std::weak_ptr for std::shared_ptr-like pointers that can
           dangle.
  Item 23: Prefer std::make_unique and std::make_shared to direct use
           of new.
  Item 24: When using the Pimpl Idiom, define special member
           functions in the implementation file.

Chapter 5 Lambda Expression
  Item 25: Avoid default capture modes.
  Item 26: Keep closures small.
  Item 27: Prefer lambdas to std::bind.

Chapter 6 Rvalue References, Move Semantics, and Perfect Forwarding
  Item 28: Understand std::move and std::forward.
  Item 29: Distinguish universal references from rvalue references.
  Item 30: Pass and return rvalue references via std::move, universal
           references via std::forward.
  Item 31: Avoid overloading on universal references.
  Item 32: Understand alternatives to overloading on universal
           references.
  Item 33: Understand reference collapsing.
  Item 34: Assume that move operations are not present, not cheap,
           and not used.
  Item 35: Familiarize yourself with perfect forwarding failure cases.

Chapter 7 The Threading API
  Item 36: Make std::threads unjoinable on all paths.
  Item 37: Specify std::launch::async if asynchronicity is essential.
  Item 38: Be aware of varying thread handle destructor behavior
  Item 39: Consider void futures for one-shot event communcation.
  Item 40: Reserve std::atomic for concurrency, volatile for memory-mapped
           I/O.
  Item 41: Employ sequential consistency if at all possible.

You may want to compare this to the initial preliminary TOCs I posted here and here to confirm that I wasn't kidding when I said that things would change. Things might change in the above TOC, too, but this one will be a lot more stable than the earlier versions.

The most recent Item I wrote was "Distinguish () and {} when creating objects." I blogged about one aspect of this topic here, and I thought you might be interested to see what I came up with. I've therefore made the current draft of this Item available, and I welcome your comments on it. Like almost all Items I've written, it's too long, so I'm especially interested in suggestions on how I can make it shorter, but I welcome all suggestions for improvement.

As things stand now, I'm hoping to have a full draft of the book by the end of April. We'll see how it goes.

Scott