Olivier Langlois's blog

I read a lot of programming books (maybe too much sometimes... :-) and I think that I am getting very hard to impress but I must confess that this book is very special. It is one of the rare book that did really open my eyes on new possibilities for programming. What the author is doing with templates are things that I have never imagined possible.

The basic concepts presented in this book are policy based class design mixed with some template metaprogramming tricks. The rest of the book consist of revisiting classic design patterns such as smart pointers, singletons and factories by implementing them by using policies and template metaprogramming. The result is, to my opinion, impressive. Implementing these classes may at some point add some complexity but customizing the end result classes is incredibly easy, flexible and requires minimal changes.

Some people did not like the book by arguing that they were not sure if they would be using the patterns presented in the book. I agree with their position and I am not sure that I would find a usage for all the patterns presented in the book or if I would just not want them in my code by fear of the added complexity but in my opinion this is not a good criteria to judge the book. It is not important to know if you are going to use the presented patterns or not. What reading this book will do for sure is to widening the horizon of what you know possible with C++ templates and bring new ideas on how some programming problems can be solved. How many C++ books can do that? For myself, they can be counted with one hand. If you retain the general concepts, it is not important to know if you will use the details.