Mateusz Loskot

By the beginning of the year 2009, new must-read book for C++ hackers is rolling around. Anthony Williams is writing book titled: C++ Concurrency in Action (ISBN: 1933988770):

I will be covering all aspects of multithreaded programming with the new C++0x standard, from the details of the new C++0x memory model and atomic operations to managing threads and designing parallel algorithms and thread-safe containers. The book will also feature a complete reference to the C++0x Standard Thread Library.

from Anthony’s blog

Since June, Anthony’s book is available through Manning Early Access Program. The final release is planned on February 2009.

In the meantime, Anthony has published an article Simpler Multithreading in C++0x introducing multithreading support and thread library as a new feature in the C++0x standard.

The Extended STL is a new C++ book written by Matthew Wilson. The first volume Collections and Iterators will be available in June 2007. Second volume Algorithms, Functions and Exotic Matter been also planned but it is still very much up in the air. The book will discuss:

principles and practices of STL extension, many of which are used in the implementation of the STLSoft libraries

The first Matt Wilson’s book - The Imperfect C++ - presented C++ language programming in a very practical way. This book has two faces. It is a C++ introductory book and it also presents various C++ weaknesses and their solutions at the same time. The Extended STL will be a kind of continuation and focus on the Standard Template Library. According to my understanding, Matt will try to present programmers with solutions of how to use C++ techniques and STL concepts with existing code bases and technologies, for instance how to use STL collections with COM objects.

Certainly, the range of topics will be much wider. As presented in the TOC, most of must-understand concepts will be presented there, like RAII, constraints and contract programming, and much more.

I think the new book will also be a perfect completion to Nicolai M. Josuttis’ The C++ Standard Library - A Tutorial and Reference.

Every programmer using ATL and WTL knows that ATL Internals is a must-read book providing comprehensive background information about ATL.

ATL is my favourite library to use as a base for Windows development. It helps to solve wide variety of problems, on both sides: client and server, especially strongly simplifies creation of COM components. ATL-based binaries are very small and robust. ATL is also an underlaying layer for WTL which is a GUI toolkit, light-weight and modern alternative to MFC.

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APress offers 8 titles completely free of charge to download in PDF format from their website - Free eBooks.

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Today, Charles Petzold announced that he has published Table of Contents of his new book:

I’ve created a page on my web site for the new book and included a Table of Contents that goes as far as I know. I hope to keep it updated as the rest of the book becomes firmer in my mind.

Charles Petzold is working on new book Applications = Code + Markup. A Guide to the Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation and he seems to not to go slow because it’s comming this fall 2006:

Yesterday I hit the 400 book pages mark. My goal of 5 books page per calendar day starting November 1st implies that I’m about a week behind. It appears now that Part 1 of the book (which sticks entirely to C# code) will be about 400 pages long.

If you are interested in what’s new in the book, visit Petzold Book Blog.

Yesterday, I collected books ordered on Amazon. Couple of weeks ago I wrote in my First order on Amazon.com post that I was affraid about the estimated delivery time - middle of the December, 2005. I’m really surprised the delivery took only about 20 days. Good for Amazon! Now I’m sure these are not my last books I ordered on Amazon.

By the way, I want to thank Tyler Mitchell for his recommendation to buy Mapping Hacks. After first look it seems to be great resource for mapping hackers and I’m sure I’ll love it. Thanks Tyler!

Three days ago I ordered two books on Amazon.com. In 24 hours after I placed my order I got a message from Amazon with confirmation that my credit card has been authorized. Hurray! Amazon also confirmed order has shipped. Nice, isn’t it. I said to my self: In two weeks you will smell your brand new books at home. But what’s that? Amazon inform me in their message that estimated delivery date: December 16, 2005. Hm, how could it be - let me ask. Don’t you have any aricrafts there, in USA?

Let’s see it in details. So, two clicks on the Google Map Pedometer and I have distance between the middle of the USA and the middle of Poland. The result is 8196.531 km or if you prefer miles, then it’s 5093.088 mil. OK, so how many days this trip will take? December 16 minus October 26 gives 51 days! Maybe they will ship my books on the raft, who knows :-) So, the only think I can do is to accept it. I only hope they don’t wet my books in the ocean. Huh? OK, here are a few more calculations made by Google, just for fun: 8196.531/51 = 160.716294 km per day and this gives 160.716294/24 = 6.69651225 km/hour. Not so fast :-(

Finally, I think I should say a word about the books, So here you are:

	Web Mapping Illustrated by Tyler Mitchell Tyler is a geographer, enthusiast and developer of Open Source Software. He contributes to many projects. You can catch him on IRC channels #gdal i #qgis on the irc.freenode.net IRC server. I also recommend great podcast by Hobu - Interview with Tyler Mitchell.
	Mapping Hacks by Schuyler Erle, Rich Gibson and Jo Walsh To make shippment costs lower I decided to order second book. First, it was one of MapServer book but Tyler suggested me to buy this one - Mapping Hacks - for learn and fun.

By the way, Amazone.com sells Tyler’s book about 10$ cheaper than O’Reilly :-)
When I get and read those books I will write some review.