Over the summer I worked with SyncFusion to create an eBook based off of my C# to C++ guide for their free Succinctly Series of eBooks. Today the result, C++ Succinctly, was published for download. It is a free (registration required; they make tools and libraries for .NET development so you might get an occasional email from them – I’ve been signed up for a few months and have had maybe 3 emails total so it’s not horrible super spam or anything ) and you can download it as a PDF or a Kindle .MOBI file (or both). I’m excited with how it turned out and enjoyed working with the people at SyncFusion. The book contains a total of 20 code samples, which you can download from BitBucket (there’s a link very early in the book). Almost all of the code is also inline in the book itself so that you don’t need to worry about flipping back and forth between your dev machine and your eReader (but if you want to try to understand a concept better, you can easily download the code, open it up in VS 2012, and play around with it to see what happens when you tinker with things). The code does require Visual Studio 2012 because of its expanded support for C++11 features and since I wrote all of the samples as Console programs for clarity and compactness, you will need a version that supports C++ desktop development (currently VS 2012 Pro, Premium, or Ultimate). Sometime this Fall, Microsoft will be releasing Visual Studio 2012 Express for Windows Desktop which should provide a free way to use the samples. That said, I tested all of the samples with MinGW and only the StorageDurationSample will not compile with it due to the thread-local storage code. If you comment that out then you can compile and run all the samples with MinGW (or using a recent version of GCC in a GNU/Linux environment, or any other C++ compiler that provides the same level of C++11 support that Visual Studio 2012 does). I hope it proves helpful to those of you who choose to check it out!
