100 C++ Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Rich Yonts

• Publisher: Manning
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Computer Science
• eBook ISBN:
  9781638357315
• Subtopic: Programming
• Index: Computer Science

Learn how to handle errors, inefficiencies, and outdated paradigms by exploring the most common mistakes you’ll find in production C++ code.

100 C++ Mistakes and How To Avoid Them reveals the problems you’ll inevitably encounter as you write new C++ code and diagnose legacy applications, along with practical techniques you need to resolve them.

Inside 100 C++ Mistakes and How To Avoid Them you’ll learn how to:

• Design solid classes
• Minimize resource allocation/deallocation issues
• Use new C++ features
• Identify the differences between compile and runtime issues
• Recognize C-style idioms that miss C++ functionality
• Use exceptions well

100 C++ Mistakes and How To Avoid Them gives you practical insights and techniques to improve your C++ coding kung fu. Author Rich Yonts has been using C++ since its invention in the 1980s. This book distills that experience into practical, reusable advice on how C++ programmers at any skill level can improve their code. Unlike many C++ books that concentrate on language theory and toy exercises, this book is loaded with real examples from production codebases.

About the technology

Over ten billion lines of C++ code are running in production applications, and 98-developers find and fix mistakes in them every day. Even mission-critical applications have bugs, performance inefficiencies, and readability problems. This book will help you identify them in the code you’re maintaining and avoid them in the code you’re writing.

About the book

100 C++ Mistakes and How To Avoid Them presents practical techniques to improve C++ code, from legacy applications to modern codebases that use C++ 11 and beyond. Author Rich Yonts provides a concrete example to illustrate each issue, along with a step-by-step walkthrough for improving readability, effectiveness, and performance. Along the way, you’ll even learn how and where to replace outdated patterns and idioms with modern C++.

What's inside

• Design solid classes
• Resource allocation/deallocation issues
• Compile and runtime problems
• Replace C-style idioms with proper C++

About the reader

Covers C++ 98 through 23, with an emphasis on diagnosing and improving legacy code.

About the author

Rich Yonts is a Senior Software Engineer at Teradata and a long-time software engineer using C++, Java, and Python. He has held a number of technical and leadership roles during his many years at IBM and Sony.

Table of Contents

1 C++: With great power comes great responsibility
Part 1
2 Better modern C++: Classes and types
3 Better modern C++: General programming
4 Better modern C++: Additional topics
Part 2
5 C idioms
6 Better premodern C++
Part 3
7 Establishing the class invariant
8 Maintaining the class invariant
9 Class operations
10 Exceptions and resources
11 Functions and coding
12 General coding

Table of contents

• 100 C++ Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
• Copyright
• contents
• front matter
• 1 C++: With great power comes great responsibility
• Part 1. Modern C++
• 2 Better modern C++: Classes and types
• 3 Better modern C++: General programming
• 4 Better modern C++: Additional topics
• Part 2. Transitional C++
• 5 C idioms
• 6 Better premodern C++
• Part 3. Classic (premodern) C++
• 7 Establishing the class invariant
• 8 Maintaining the class invariant
• 9 Class operations
• 10 Exceptions and resources
• 11 Functions and coding
• 12 General coding
• index