However, this book's strength is its coverage of the basic concepts that every C and C++ programmer should thoroughly understand. Chuck spares us any esoteric topics. If you expect to find any discussion of the latest ANSI standard features, you will be disappointed. Date and time processing, for instance, are explained in terms of the C locale rather than the C++ locales. Also, programming with templates or exceptions is barely discussed. In contrast, the C library is covered thoroughly, and basic concepts such as visibility and lifetime of identifiers and objects are explained in a truly instructive and didactically excellent way. In sum, system-level programmers will love this book; people who love esoterica will prefer something else!

  C&C++ Code Capsules is organized into three three parts. The preliminaries discuss the "close to C" part of C++: function-based programming, everything about pointers, and comprehensive coverage of the standard C library. The key concepts cover the typical C++ language features: classes, templates, exceptions, and polymorphism, but also conversions and casts, a topic that is often paid little attention to. Finally, the book discusses leveraging the standard library. As the title says, this is about algorithms, containers, iterators from the standard C++ library, but also about strings, both C- and C++-style strings, file processing, time and date processing by means of the C library, and memory management in C and C++.

 The book excels at insightful explanations of basic concepts. Highlights include its discussion of pointers, about which you learn everything that you could possibly want to know, starting with what a pointer is, how pointer arithmetics work (even including a discussion of different storage schemes such as big-endian and little-endian), to constness of pointers and categories of pointers (such as pointers to arrays, to functions, to members functions), and more. In addition, the discussion of integers and floats is excellent. Do you know how floating point numbers are represented? Do you know what the constant DBL_MANT_DIG means or what the "machine epsilon" is? If you want to do floating point arithmetics, you should understand these concepts. Chuck gives a wonderful introduction into issues related to numbers, not only their representation but also integral promotions and demotions as well as arithmetic conversions implicitly performed by the C++ compiler. Finally, bit manipulation. Chuck is the father of the bit handling classes in the standard C++ library. Naturally, he covers bit fiddling in all its hues and shades: bitwise operators, bitmasks, bitsets, and bit strings.

 So, what will this book buy you? Let us quote the author himself: "Pointers gone awry are the nastiest bugs a C++ programmer has to contend with. Indeed, pointers and the raw power they give the developer have long been a popular criticism of C. It's just too dangerous, people say." He closes his pointer chapter with the statement that "C and C++ are only as dangerous as those who use them. ... If you understand these concepts, you are on your way to becoming a responsible C++ programmer. Now go tell your boss she can trust you to write real programs." It's a book for practitioners, indeed. 

Angelika Langer develops and teaches classes on advanced C++, STL, multithreading, internationalization, and Java. She has served on the ANSI/ISO C++ Committee since 1993. Klaus Kreft is a software architect and consultant with more than a decade of experience in industrial software development. He works for Siemens Business Services in Germany. Langer and Kreft are working on a book about standard C++ iostreams and locales and are columnists for C++ Report .