Nicolas Lehuen's Weblog

OK, so up until recently I had the nerve to write on my resumé that I had an advanced knowledge in C++. Well, the bad news is that it’s not totally true, since each time I read an item from Effective C++, I make a loud « Duh ! » and learn another bunch of things I’d rather not know about C++. The good news is that I think pretty much everybody will have the same reaction. The baseline is that you cannot write effective C++ code if you don’t read this book. Period.

C++ is so tricky and ugly that it is becoming beautiful in its weird own way. We should all be grateful that simpler languages have appeared and thrived, like Java, C# or even better, D (well, D is not in the thriving lot yet, but I truly hope so). Still, sometimes, you have to write C++ if you want some really portable, low-level (by which I mean total control on the implementation), fast code.

A unexpected side-effect of this book is that it’s choke-full of interview questions, should you want to hire a C++ specialist. I think I’ll use some on my next interview, even if the person is not a C++ specialist, just to scare him/her .

The most obvious side-effect is that I’m refactoring the C++ part of pytst. I have integrated the PythonReference class from my previous post, but I had to make a few modifications to follow the advice of Effective C++.