Average Customer Review:  
| important information for any serious C++ developer | |
Few C++ books talk about such important aspects of programming like design and development for performance, as well as performance tuning. Even smaller number of them support their arguments with the actual test numbers. This book is different: on many occasions the authors show quantitative difference between techniques, which is very useful for understanding the trade-offs and is much more convincing than simply referring to common sense or authors' past experience.This book is a well-written overview of the C++ performance programming techniques. It looks into a broad spectrum of the issues, some of them are examined in a great detail, like C++ inlining. Most often there is no free lunch in software development, and the book does a good job of showing the trade-offs of performance techniques, keeps a good balance of not advocating extra efforts simply for the sake of having faster programs. The book has many coding examples that show "side-by-side" performance of different code snippets trying to achieve the same computational goal. The examples are very simple and are independent off each other, so one does not have to read all the previous chapters to understand a point made in the middle of the book. Elegance usually goes hand-in-hand with good performance, so if you are just a beginner in C++, this book will help you to polish the patterns of your programming style. I think that this book will be helpful to any C++ programmer, especially to one who is writing real-time or performance intensive applications. I wish the management could read and understand it too: hopefully then it wouldn't assume that "performance profiling" is just an afterthought and is not a necessary entry in the schedule for every serious product.
| A great (and underappreciated) book | |
First off: it's practical! It's based not on some tenured professor's abstract hifalutin vaporous gobbledegook but on personal, actual, concrete experiences of the author. A pleasure to learn from. Well written too! Which can't be taken for granted anymore. The book is appropriately titled (rare as well.) To make it short: if you're interested in efficiency with C++ that's the book to buy, w/o thinking, right off the web. Satisfaction guaranteed, even, btw, if you don't particularly care for efficiency but are an in-general curious C++ programmer. Being a ninkompoop and a cantakerous, argumentative [person] that I am, I rarely praise anyone, as you can figure from my name, but this book gets a triple-A, ten stars from me. I'm watching this author from now on, on par with Meyers, Richter, and Stevens.
| Keys to acceptable C++ performance | |
The authors are developers of network and web server software for IBM. They specifically target performance issues related to C++ programming. The primary topics of discussion are constructors & destructors, virtual functions, return value optimization, temporary objects, inlining, memory managers, and reference counting. Learn how to create efficient constructor functions. Learn how to avoid the costly construction of temporary objects. The authors promote "lazy evaluation" and nail "useless computations" and "obsolete code." Algorithm and data structure discussions are referred to other standard references, however there is coverage of the STL structures (insertion, deletion, traversal, and find operations). An additional bonus is the excellent coverage of multithreading issues.
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