Effective C Plus Plus
From StoneHome
This book is part of the Meyers Trio, and can be purchased at a discount with its sequel on CD. This is one of the few eBooks I've ever not hated; the author explicitly rejects asinine copy protection measures, and provides a good portable search tool. I actually use my CD copy more frequently than my dead tree copy, and that's a very rare choice for me.
This is always the first book I recommend to an aspiring C++ programmer, whether they have experience in other languages or not. Though it's certainly not a primer, nor even a tutorial, Effective C++ and its two counterparts is in my opinion the best way for a new C++ programmer to get their land legs, to avoid many typical failures in implementation, and to avoid many design problems. This book discusses many both subtle and not-so-subtle issues in C++, frequently as surround inheritance, polymorphism, appropriate class behavior, and so on. This book clears up the proper way to return values from operators, establishes firmly the "good enough for the ints" viewpoint, and can save a novice agonizing over well understood difficulties in immature approaches to code. This book is a prerequisite to almost every advanced C++ book, as without its admonishments most programmers simply cannot implement the complex systems described in other books. All three books of the Meyers Trio are near-critical reads for anyone which wants to take C++ at all seriously. Perhaps more important is the fashion in which Scott Meyers writes: his examples are engaging, his explanations easily understood, and his jokes are actually funny, putting him immediately a head and shoulders' height above other authors in simple readability; even having gone through his text as often as I have (and I'm heavily reliant on this work,) I still find things to laugh at from time to time, and frequently find myself reading things I wasn't looking up just because they're a joy to read. There are almost no books I believe in as strongly as these - contenders only in Design Patterns, Knuth and The Mythical Man Month, so far.
