If you’re an experienced C++ programmer and are anything like me, you initially approached C++11 thinking, “Yes, yes, I get it. It’s C++, only more so.” But as you learned more, you were surprised by the scope of the changes. auto declarations, range-based for loops, lambda expressions, and rvalue references change the face of C++, to say nothing of the new concurrency features. And then there are the idiomatic changes. 0 and typedefs are out, nullptr and alias declarations are in. Enums should now be scoped. Smart pointers are now preferable to built-in ones. Moving objects is normally better than copying them. There’s a lot to learn about C++11, not to mention C++14. More importantly, there’s a lot to learn about making effective use of the new capabil‐ ities. If you need basic information about “modern” C++ features, resources abound, but if you’re looking for guidance on how to employ the features to create software that’s correct, efficient, maintainable, and portable, the search is more challenging. That’s where this book comes in. It’s devoted not to describing the features of C++11 and C++14, but instead to their effective application.
The information in the book is broken into guidelines called Items. Want to under‐ stand the various forms of type deduction? Or know when (and when not) to use auto declarations? Are you interested in why const member functions should be thread safe, how to implement the Pimpl Idiom using std::unique_ptr, why you should avoid default capture modes in lambda expressions, or the differences between std::atomic and volatile? The answers are all here. Furthermore, they’re platform-independent, Standards-conformant answers. This is a book about portable C++.
