An excellent treatment of the topic

This was a pivotal book for me. I'd been working with C++, both as a programmer and a compiler writer, for almost 20 years. Yet despite an intimate familiarity with templates, the notions of template metaprogramming had always eluded me. By chapter 3 of this book, however, it felt as though a heavy curtain had been lifted. I actually became excited to wake up each day at the thought of reading the next chapter! Imagine that, from a C++ book.

The material is well-paced, lucidly written, and doesn't stray into minutae any longer than necessary. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to find out more about applying metaprogramming techniques to their own code. I'm already thinking of news ways I can use it. The only caveat I would mention is that your background will in large part determine this book's value to you. Coming from a C++ background, and lately having an intense interest in Haskell, I found many of this book's points "popped out" at me, showing connections between runtime C++ and compile-time functional programming (in the strange meta-language that is compile-time C++). But had I not had that prior experience, and been struggling with the very issues this book solves, some of it may not have had as great an impact. Be ready to do more research if you find the material a bit rough going. There are some profound implications between its pages that may not be obvious at first, but they're there.

Other Reviews

• An excellent treatment of the topic
• Good for gurus, too much for anyone else
• Unique material
• It's about Metaprogramming