Disclaimer
This post is the personal summary and additional information of the book titled “Effective Modern C++: 42 Specific Ways to Improve Your Use of C++11 and C++14”. This post lists the items introduced in the book and summarizes each of the item so that it can be used as cookbook. The post never gaurantees the correctness of the content and may contains my personal opinion. However, for those who already bought this book, it can help. If you want to cite this post, please do not cite this post but the original book. I am planning to add some code examples on each item when I encounter the exact or similar situation.
Chapter 1: Deducing Types
Item 1: Understand template type deduction.
The keyword auto has pros and cons. Obviously, one of the good aspects is that you don’t have to explicitly specify the type. However, the bad news is that the type deduction rules are not easy to intrinsically understand. It sometimes deduces different from your expectation. Thus, it is important to throughly understand the rules before you use.
Item 2: Understand auto type deduction.
Item 3: Understand decltype
Item 4: Know how to view deduced types.
Chapter 2: auto
Item 5: Prefer auto to explicit type declarations.
Item 6: Use the explicitly typed initializer idiom when auto deduces undesired types.
Chapter 3: Moving to Modern C++
Item 7: Distinguish between () and {} when creating objects.
Item 8: Prefer nullptr to 0 or NULL.
Item 9: Prefer alias declarations to typedefs.
Item 10: Prefer scoped enums to unscoped enums
Item 11: Prefer deleted fuctions to private undefined ones.
Item 12: Declare overriding functions override.
Item 13: Prefer const_iterators to iterators.
Item 14: Declare functions noexcept if they won’t emit exceptions.
Item 15: Use constexpr whenever possible.
Item 16: Make const member functions thread safe.
Item 17: Understand special member function generation.
Chapter 4: Smart Pointers
Item 18: Use std::unique_ptr for exclusive-ownership resource management.
Item 19: Use std::shared_ptr for shared-ownership resource management.
Item 20: Use std::weak_ptr for std::shared_ptr-like pointers that can dangle.
Item 21: Prefer std::make_unique and std::make_shared to direct use of new.
Item 22: WHen using the Pimpl Idiom, define special member functions in the implementation file.
Chapter 5: Rvalue References, Move Semantices, and Perfect Forwarding
Item 23: Understand std::move and std::forward.
Item 24: Distinguish universal references from rvalue references.
Item 25: Use std::move on rvalue references, std::forward on universal references.
Item 26: Avoid overloading on universal references.
Item 27: Familiarize yourself with alternamtives to overloading on universal references.
Item 28: Understand reference collapsing.
Item 29: Assume that move operations are not present, not cheap, and not used.
Item 30: Familiarize yourself with perfect forwarding failure cases.
Chapter 6: Lambda Expressions
Item 31: Avoid default capture modes.
Item 32: Use init capture to move objects into closures.
Item 33: Use decltype on auto&& parameters to std::forward them.
Item 34: Prefer lambdas to std::bind.
Chapter 7: The Concurrency API
Item 35: Prefer task-based programming to thread-based.
Item 36: Specify std::launch::async if asynchronicity is essential.
Item 37: Make std::threads unjoinable on all paths.
Item 38: Be aware of varying thread handle destructor behavior.
Item 39: Consider void futures for one-shot event communication.
Item 40: Use std::atomic for concurrency, volatile for special memory.
Chapter 8: Tweaks
Item 41: Consider pass by value for copyable parameters that are cheap to move and always copied.
Item 42: Consider emplacement instead of insertion.