Accelerated C++

What Hacker News says

1. dkenyserJul 2025
   This reminds me of reading Accelerated C++ back in the day and I think the part that stuck with me most from that book was the idea of "holding the invariant in your head" (I'm paraphrasing a bit).

   It made me think a lot more about every line of code I wrote and definitely helped me become a better programmer.

   thread
2. davidthewatsonApr 2024
   Good point! Me too.

   My g++ emits exactly the errors and instructions you described.

   I haven't read the current Stroustrup version under discussion, but I did read the earlier version when C++ was all day, every day for me.

   I prefer Koenig and Moo's Accelerated C++ twenty years on though I admit there may be better books since which I've not read.

   IIRC, their hello world was:

       // a small C++ program
       #include <iostream>
       int main()
       {
           std::cout << "Hello, world!" << std::endl;
       }
   

   Which copy pastas into my current arch linux, builds in:

       g++ a.cpp 
   

   and runs in:

       ./a.out
       Hello World!
   

   as it has since I first read it twenty years ago, and likely did before that.

   The rest of the book was a tour de force of making modern C++ emulate the near-pseudocode, sans pointer arithmetic of C, simple-and-clean, buttoned-up style seen in early python, where none of those things existed until pandas brought wrapped C++ libs along with it like numpy and scipy.

   Professionally, I've not seen clean C++ code in the wild, though I don't work at FAANG and code reviews are unusual in rapid prototypes so I'm not sure how widely Koenig and Moo are mentored outside the greenfield world I've lived in with the possible exception of radiotherapy where you're trying to avoid being the next Therac 25.

   Show morethread
3. theususOct 2023
   And that is why I like the book Accelerated C++. Instead of explaining each and everything. It helps just the right things, thus preparing you for further adventures. Another literature that comes closer is Designing Data Intensive Applications and SICP.
   thread
4. davidthewatsonApr 2023
   This has won countless races for just about every top F1 driver you can name for decades, prolly WRC too. That old analog world transfers nicely to digital in video gaming. Sadly, it's not more widely accepted in software development though software design and software deployment seem to have caught on.

   As an old C++ hacker, I'm waiting for the day when modern C++ shops read Accelerated C++ from Koenig and Moo circa two decades ago. Then, I could rejoice in someone anywhere writing C++ code that more closely resembled the python-esque C++ masquerading as pseudo-code in that book.

   More sadly, I just keep seeing people emulate bit-twiddling from yesteryear when the compiler likely optimizes a fair bit of this.

   The cyclomatic complexity scores in the paper look off by an order-of-magnitude but they may be better than the laugh riot I've measured in the last few years and my math may be failing me at runtime.

   Show morethread
5. city41Feb 2022
   Accelerated C++ by Andrew Koenig and Barbara Moo. I'm sure it's hopelessly outdated and irrelevant today. It was one of the first CS books I read and I really dug into and grokked it. I think it played a large role in the developer I became.

   It's very pragmatic, but also pushes into thinking through the design of your system and also digs into the "why" and "how" of what is going on and balances all of this quite well IMO. I still have my copy on my shelf.

   Show morethread
6. khinerMay 2021
   Shameless plug but I put together some Jupyter notebooks that walk through several of the fantastic books recommended in this thread: https://github.com/khiner/notebooks

   I wanted to help myself and other folks develop better intuitions around the material, particularly focusing on short animations to develop better visual intuition along with working code examples of the material in the books.

   Books covered (with a notebook for each chapter):

   * Musimathics volumes 1 & 2 by Gareth Loy

   * Introduction to the DFT by Julius Smith

   * Introduction to Digital Filters by Julius Smith

   * Physical Audio Signal Processing by Julius Smith

   also a couple not directly about audio but helpful for the domain:

   * Coding the Matrix by Philip Klein

   * Accelerated C++ by Andrew Koenig and Barbara Moo

   Hope someone gets some value from these - have fun!

   Show morethread