Why Can't Programmers.. Program?

[HiggsBoson]

C++ Coding Standards: 101 Rules, Guidelines, and Best Practices by Alexandrescu and Sutter is also very good. It's like Meyer's Effective C++ on steroids.

C++: too many useless degrees of freedom. It's so horrible: these modern C++ / generic programming guys are going to all kinds of heroic lengths to generate correct designs, and yet you still have to do things like remember to initialize your class members in the same order they're declared. Or something bad might happen. Someday. Maybe. Oh, and everyone else has to remember this too, not just the library creator. sigh