Wednesday, September 22, 1999

New MIND Article; URL problem in DDJ Article

The October issue of Microsoft Internet Developer ("MIND")
(http://www.microsoft.com/mind/) contains an article by me, "Browsing
Innovations for Books on CD-ROM." The article describes the novel features
AW and I developed for the Effective C++ CD. This is the introductory
paragraph of the article:

What should a book on a CD-ROM look like? How should it behave? When I
began to think seriously about putting my book, Effective C++
(Addison-Wesley, 1998), onto a CD in the spring of 1998, I didn't
know. From what I could tell by talking to producers and consumers of
existing CD books, nobody else did either.

MIND makes the first part of the article available at their web site as a
teaser. The URL is
http://www.microsoft.com/mind/1099/browsing/browsing.htm. The material in
the article is quite similar to that in the paper Jason Jones and I
presented at the recent Conference on Human Factors and the web
(http://zing.ncsl.nist.gov/hfweb/), "Document Design for Effective
Electronic Publication". That paper is available at
http://zing.ncsl.nist.gov/hfweb/proceedings/meyers-jones/index.html. The
material in the MIND article is also similar to what I say in the CD's
introduction, and you can read that at
http://meyerscd.awl.com/DEMO/INTRO/INDEX.HTM.

(I should really be pushing you to track down a copy of the current MIND, I
suppose, but MS was a pain to work with on this article, plus they used the
incorrect product image in the article (the cover for EC++/2E instead of
the EC++CD), so I find it hard to get too excited about pushing you towards
them.)

I hope you like the MIND article (or the close cousins I mentioned above),
but please note that these pieces are *not* about C++, they're about
designing electronic documents.

In the meantime, it has been brought to my attention that DDJ munged a URL
during preparation of my article on operator->*. On page 36 of the current
(October DDJ), the correct URL is this:

http://www.xmission.com/~ksvhsoft/code/index.html

Typos like this are one of many reasons why working with magazines is a
pain and why I insist on typesetting my own books.

Scott

Wednesday, September 15, 1999

My DDJ Article on operator->*

The October issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal (http://www.ddj.com/) contains an
article by me, "Implementing operator->* for Smart Pointers." I just
received my issue in the mail today, so it should be generally available
now or quite soon. This is the introductory paragraph:

When I wrote More Effective C++ in 1995, one of the topics I examined was
smart pointers. As a result, I get a fair number of questions about them,
and one of the most interesting recent questions came from Andrei
Alexandrescu. He asked, "Shouldn't a really smart smart pointer overload
operator->*? I've never seen it done." I hadn't seen it done, either, so
I set out to do it. The result is instructive, I think, and for more than
just operator->*; it also involves insights into interesting and useful
applications of templates.

I wasn't thrilled when DDJ insisted on moving all my code examples into
separate listings, because I think it makes the article harder to read.
At some point in the future, I hope to make an HTML version of the article
available at my web site, and that version of the article would have the
code examples mixed in with the descriptive text (which is how I originally
wrote the article). If/when such a version is available, I'll let you
know.

I hope you like the article.

Scott