Effective C++
Effective C++ has been updated to reflect the latest ANSI/ISO standards. The author, a recognised authority on C++, shows readers fifty ways to improve their programs and designs.
Stats for nerds
112recommend
212mentions
184people
2007–2026years
59% recommend36% neutral5% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Fail, and try to understand why. Don't be quick with the answer. Sometimes it takes years. But it's crucial to want to improve, and recognize when the answer is in front of you.
Read why programming languages have the structures what they have. Challenge them. They are full with mistakes. One infamous example is the "final" keyword in Java. Or for example, Python's list comprehension. There are better solutions to these. Be annoyed by them, and search for solutions. Read also about why these mistakes were made. Figure out your own version which doesn't have any of the known mistakes and problems.
The same with "principles" or rule of thumbs. Read about the reasons, and break them when the reasons cannot be applied.
And use a ton of programming languages and frameworks. And not just Hello World levels, but really dig deep them for months. Reach their limits, and ask the question, why those limits are there. As you encounter more and more, you will be able to reach those limits quicker and quicker.
One very good language for this, I think, is TypeScript. Compared to most other languages its type inference is magic. Ask why. The good thing of it is that its documentation contains why other languages cannot do the same. Its inference routinely breaks with edge cases, and they are well documented.
Also Effective C++ and Effective Modern C++ were my eye openers more than a decade ago for me. I can recommend them for these purposes. They definitely helped me to loose my "junior" flavor. They explain quite well the reasons as far as I remember.
- Before asking my questions, I’d like to share a bit of my background.
I am a 33-year-old developer living in South Korea. I work mostly in the industrial sector, far from major IT hubs, so I rarely have people around me to discuss programming with or to review my code.
My career isn’t "strong" in the traditional sense. Most of my work has been practical B2B freelancing: PLC/ladder-based control systems for factory equipment, desktop applications using WinForms and occasionally WPF, and small-scale web projects like e-commerce sites and business homepages for local clients.
I have delivered software to about 40 companies and over 380 individual clients. But to be honest, much of this work relies on modifying existing templates and repeating similar patterns.
Because of this, I often feel like I am not a "real" programmer in the way many here might expect. My knowledge comes from Microsoft documentation and classic books like Code Complete, Effective C++, and Out of the Tar Pit, rather than from working inside strong engineering teams. I've recently been reading books like Building Microservices to catch up, but I still feel like I'm lagging behind modern Western engineers.
Recently, using AI tools made programming exciting again, but it also made me realize exactly how much I don't know. Being a non-native English speaker has made it harder to access information and network, and I've realized my tech stack and practices are a bit dated. To break out of this bubble and connect with the global community, I’m finally ditching SVN for Git and built a bilingual personal site (www.makonea.com).
To be completely honest about my situation: I originally wanted to move to Seoul (Korea's tech hub) to join a proper IT company. However, I fell victim to a massive housing lease fraud (a severe and known issue in Korea). I was forced to move to the provinces and spent the last few years just grinding to pay off that fraudulent debt. I have finally cleared it, but I’m finding it incredibly hard to keep doing this factory-level freelance work.
I want to leave the factory environment and become a product developer—someone who builds, owns, and operates software. I have delivered Unity games and websites before, but since I specialize in "fire-and-forget" delivery, I have almost zero experience in operating and maintaining a product over the long term.
My questions are:
What are the best places (blogs, forums, newsletters, communities) to learn serious software engineering beyond the beginner level?
How can someone outside the US/Big Tech ecosystem judge whether information or a specific practice is actually high quality?
What technologies or practices should I focus on to transition from a freelance "deliverable" mindset to building and operating scalable products?
Are there good examples of small, successful products built by solo developers that I can study?
Any advice or pointers would be deeply appreciated. Thank you.
- Among non-fiction what stood out to me was David Bentley Hart's All Things are Full of Gods, great book also very fun to read written as a Platonic dialogue. To me one of the most compelling theologians today.
Bruno Maçães, World Builders. Good book on the impact of technology in geopolitics has been consistently interesting.
Among fiction re-read a lot of Lovecraft, noticed that I like the Dream Quest stories more than the horror these days which surprised me. But they're more compelling to me now because of how much you can see Lovecraft as a person in them.
The last three Dune books. Liked the last two about the Bene Gesserit a lot, was surprised how much I disliked God Emperor given the praise it gets, but it honestly reads like Frank Herbert posting twitter hot takes as a worm with no story
Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger. Among the best novellas I've ever read, very different in tone from most of his books.
Shūsaku Endō, Silence. Book about a Jesuit mission in early Edo Japan. My favorite Japanese book in a long time.
Among technical books, re-read The Mythical Man Month, probably more relevant than it ever was in an age of artifical man-hours added to projects. Robert Seacord Effective C, after not having written C in a long time. Really good intermediate level book for modern C. Also making my way through The Little Schemer as a replacement for advent of code in the second half of the month this year.
- This is a really well written article that explains the concepts straightforwardly. I had never bothered to understand this before.
... because I gave up on C++ in 2011, after reading Scott Meyers excellent Effective C++. It made me realize I had no desire to use a language that made it so difficult to use it correctly.
- I had exactly the same reaction to Effective C++, and I'd learned it back in the 90's (my first compiler didn't even support templates!). It's a wonderful book for sure, but it's a wonderfully detailed map to a minefield. The existence of guidelines like the "Rule of 7" should be raising questions as to why such a rule needs to exist in the first place.
As for this article, it really did de-mystify those strange foo&& things for me. I had no idea that they're functionally identical to references and that what C++ does with them is left up to convention. But I still felt like I had to fight against sanity loss from a horrid realization.
- Note that this is not a complete list, fwiw. For example, I doesn't include "Effective C." [1].
I like "Effective C" over "Modern C" because it's more engaging ... "Modern C" is super rigorous and feels a bit like reading an annotated spec of the language, which is what an expert may need, but makes for a dull read for a casual C user like me.
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