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Imperfect C++: Practical Solutions for Real-Life Programming Review by Thing with a hook
Genuinely new C++ material
This is very different from the many 'intermediate C++' books that are on the market. If you've had your fill of reading about pimpls, use of const and which overloaded operators should be members, it's time to read 'Imperfect C++'.
Be warned, it does take a little while to get going, and the author has a rather unusual writing style, which can best be described as an informal hybrid of Aussie and British. And admittedly the opening part of the book covers material reminiscent of the likes of 'Effective C++', albeit with a stronger emphasis on optimisation.
But once it gets going, there's a whole new world opened up, rather remote from the rarefied atmosphere of more theoretical books. Imperfect C++ has a very 'in the trenches' feel, where you need to write programs that talk to C, and on a Windows platform. None of the book is about object oriented design as such, but has a library designer's appreciation for dealing with operating system quirks.
You know how lots of books have advice along the lines of "NEVER do this" or "ALWAYS do this"? Matthew Wilson takes great delight in providing examples where you might want to do the opposite, and covers a wide variety of topics, including defining a portable boolean, a NULL value, and C#/Pascal/Python-like properties.
Purists will almost certainly dislike the fairly heavy use of macros for some of the solutions here, you'll have to get used to the appearance of code with a plethora of underscores in. And the book assumes a reasonably high level of knowledge of C++. In particular, there's little hand holding. Entire class definitions are often provided, but you won't always get example application code to see it in action. This is a little unfortunate, particularly in the chapters where the author introduces his own idioms. It requires careful concentration to work out the physical layout of some of the solutions (e.g. are these free functions or member functions? In the same namespace or a different namespace?). On the other hand, some readers will no doubt welcome the vigorous thought that is required.
Overall, this is a very different, practical book to most of the C++ books out there, with a very high signal-to-noise ratio. Add it to your C++ recommended reading list.