Olivier Langlois's blog

I did not like this book because I found it hard to read. Some books are hard to read but worth reading because they teach you something. This one is hard to read and I could not make any sense with the book content. You should definitly avoid this book except if you want to find a cure for insomnia.

First prior to reading this book, I was finding the title unattractive. I did not know what statecharts were and what Quantum programming was. By reading this book, I have learn that statecharts were special finite state machines that could be built by deriving them from more general FSM similar to how OO classes inheritance works.

Quantum is the name of the presented framework in the book. The title is misleading because I though that Quantum programming was some weird new programming technique that I was not aware and did not care to learn. I think that it is important to find catchy names to market software but one negative point of the book, is that the author spend way too much pages to describe similarities between quantum physics and his framework to justify the name 'Quantum' for his framework. Programmers are not all quantum physics enthusiasts!

Concerning the book content, the author presents the C++ classes implementing the statecharts framework and a set of classes to make threads driven by statecharts collaborate together by communicating with message queues. It is an interesting reading and there are many places where you can learn good programming tricks by seeing the author code. However, I am not sure that I would want to use the framework because it is complex. Let me clarify what I mean. It is not the framework that is complex but implementing statecharts is complex. I believe that the author made his code as simple as possible to implement statecharts. Personally, I still have to work on a problem where a simple FSM will not be enough.

The best feature of the book is its presentation of a base class to implement FSMs and compares it with traditional table based FSMs and a OO FSM like the one presented in the Design Pattern book and it is highly convincing that his FSM implementation is superior to the other 2 in size, performance and ease of maintenance. Another interesting topic is the author method to emulate C++ in C. You cannot beat the real thing with an emulation but when you have to go write C and you are used to do OO programming, this method might become handy.

I would say that for the FSM pattern and the C++ in C methodology alone, even if it represents a small proportion of pages in the book, it justifies the purchase of this book.

Yes it is outdated as it does not cover the latest features added to the standard. However it does describe in great details the core language and it is still the most detailed book about C++ to my knowledge after the C++ standard document text itself. Even the latest edition of 'The C++ programming language' book does not provide as much details about the language itself.

I have red this book for the first time 4 years ago. What I remember is that, at that time, I got few interesting informations here and there but overall the reading was more tedious than enjoyable. For some reasons, I have reread this book for a second time and perhaps because I could now relate my C++ programming experience with what the book explains, I have found it much more enjoyable to read this time. So my opinion is that to really get the maximum out of this book, you really need intimate knowledge and experience with the C++ programming language. I would not recommend this book for someone that has just started to use C++. Also, you have to know what the book is about. Do not expect to get practical knowledge to improve your C++ skills because you will not get much. The only exception is that this book made me curious about the "intersection" rule from Andrew Koenig about overloaded functions and made me look into the Annotated C++ reference manual to know more about it. This book is more about the C++ history and how and why certain design decisions have been taken about the language. If this is what you are expecting, you will like the book.

The book title suggested to me that the book would follow the Effective C++ series format where advices are given in small items. This is not the case. This book has a more conservative format where topics are presented in chapters. This is not a problem per se but I just wanted to say it to potential readers that could have the same impression that I had by seeing the title. That being said, the topics covered are the usual areas where you can usually gain some performance such as temporaries, memory allocation and inlines. I cannot say that I have learned a lot of things because writing performant C++ code has been a topic of interest to me for a very long time.

The chapter about inlines is mixed bag of very good information and useless information. What I did appreciate less is that several pages are dedicated for describing what could be possible to do with inlines if very smart compilers were available. It was interesting to read but nothing applicable immediatly. Maybe this section is a wish list intended to be read by compiler implementers. However at the same time, it is the chapter that gave me the most new tricks that I did not already knew. This is the book that presents how to efficiently use inlines in the best way that I have seen in books.

Finally, if I abstract the fact that I did not learn a lot of new things, I must say that it is very well written. It is interesting to read. The authors give reference to actual cases from their work experience and this book would probably be very beneficial to read for someone that has never yet spent a lot of time doing code optimization.