Afterword

If you've enjoyed the puzzles and problems in this book, then I have good news for you. This is not the end, for Guru of the Week #30 was not the last GotW, nor have I stopped writing articles in various programming magazines.

Today, on the Internet, new GotW issues are being published and discussed and debated regularly on the newsgroup comp.lang.c++.moderated, and are archived at the official GotW Website at www.gotw.ca. As I write this, in June 1999, we're already up to #55. To give you a taste for what's coming, a small sampling of the new GotW issues includes fresh material on such topics as the following:

• More information on popular themes, including the safe use of auto_ptr, namespaces, and exception-safety issues and techniques, taking the next step beyond Items 8 through 17, 31 through 34, and 37.

• A three-part series on reference-counting and copy-on-write techniques, including unusual performance implications in multithreaded (or multithread-capable) environments, with extensive test harness code and statistical measurements. There's material here that you usually don't see discussed anywhere else.

• Many puzzles about the safe and effective use of standard library, especially containers (like vector and map) and the standard streams. This includes more information about how to best extend the standard library, in the spirit of Items 2 and 3.

• A nifty game: writing a MasterMind-playing program in as few statements as possible.

And that's just a small sample. If there is enough interest in the book you're holding in your hands now, my intention is to produce another volume containing expanded and reorganized forms of the next batch of issues, again including the text of the other C++ engineering articles and columns that I'm writing for C/C++ Users Journal, and other magazines.

I hope you've enjoyed the book, and that you'll continue to let me know what interesting topics you'd like to see covered in the future; see the Website mentioned earlier for how to submit requests. Some topics you've read about herein were prompted by e-mails like these.

Thanks again to all who have expressed interest and support for GotW and this book. I hope you've found this material to be useful in your daily work, as you keep on writing faster, cleaner, and safer C++ programs.