Foreword; Acknowledgments; Introduction; Part I. Diamonds From Deep in the Past: 1. Finite state machines: a model of behavior for C++ Immo Hüneke; 2. Abstract classes and pure virtual functions Robert C. Martin; 3. Memory management and smart pointers Cay S. Horstmann; 4. Pointers vs. references Stan Lippman; 5. Much ado about null Dr. James M. Coggins; 6. Setting the stage James O. Coplien; 7. Perspectives from the 'gang of four' John Vlissides; Part II. Present Day Industrial Diamonds: 8. The open-closed principle Robert C. Martin; 9. Large-scale C++ software design John Lakos; 10. Taskmaster: an architecture pattern for GUI applications Robert C. Martin, James W. Newkirk and Bhama Rao; 11. Monostate classes: the power of one Steve Ball and John Crawford; 12. Applying the ABC metric to C, C++, and Java Jerry Fitzpatrick; 13. Patterns for mapping OO applications to relational databases Alberto Antenangeli; 14. Designing exception-safe generic containers Herb Sutter; 15. The anatomy of the assignment operator Richard Gillian; 16. Thread-specific storage for C/C++ Douglas C. Schmidt, Nat Pryce and Timothy H. Harrison; 17. Making the world safe for exceptions Matthew H. Austern; 18. What's in a class? Herb Sutter; 19. Pimples - beauty marks you can depend on Herb Sutter; 20. External polymorphism Chris Cleeland and Douglas C. Schmidt; 21. A technique for safe deletion with object locking Jeff Grossman; 22. GPERF: a perfect hash function generator Douglas C. Schmidt; 23. Uses and abuses of inheritance Herb Sutter; 24. Review: the BOOSE programming language Herb Sutter; Index.