Way back in 2022, I got the idea to do the Martin Gardner thing — to collect a few of the best posts I’d written for this blog and publish them as a proper paper book. I chickened out at the time, but this month I decided the stars were right to revisit that old project and finally publish my first collection of Essays on Modern C++.

Okay, “proper paper book” is an exaggeration: At least for now the book is available only in PDF/ePub format through Leanpub.com. (This is the same platform used for direct sales by Jason Turner and Nicolai Josuttis, among others.) But I’ve got a print version ready to go, if Leanpub ever starts offering print sales or if a publisher reaches out.

I see this collection of my old blog posts as perhaps of little interest to someone who already has ready access to my blog; just as Gardner’s collections might have been of little interest to someone who already had a full back catalog of his Scientific American columns. But if you were just waiting for a nicely typeset PDF to convince your coworker of a particular pet peeve — well, maybe this book is for you. Also, to give a little extra incentive even to regular readers of this blog (who are, after all, the most likely buyers of such an e-book), I round out the baker’s dozen with one previously unpublished chapter — a quick five pages on the implementation of std::tuple_cat.

The essays collected in this first book are:

• “const is a contract” (2019-01-03)
• “How to erase from an STL container” (2020-07-08)
• “What =delete means” (2021-10-17)
• “Value category is not lifetime” (2019-03-11)
• “What is ADL?” (2019-04-26)
• “What is the std::swap two-step?” (2020-07-11)
• “How do using namespace directives work?” (2020-12-21)
• “SCARY metafunctions” (2018-07-09)
• “Iteration is better than recursion” (2018-07-23)
• “How is tuple_cat implemented?” (previously unpublished)
• “Why don’t Concepts do definition checking?” (2019-07-22)
• “Why do we require requires requires?” (2019-01-15)
• “Concepts can’t do quantifiers” (2020-08-10)

Each essay has been “remastered” for the 2020s (specifically, for 2022); for example, outdated references to “C++2a” have been replaced with “C++20.” The essays have also been remastered for print; for example, inline code snippets replace the original posts’ Godbolt links, and informative footnotes replace or augment many of the blog’s simple hyperlinks. The book also includes an exhaustive four-page subject index.

Errata and comments are of course welcome: send me an email!