[Baypiggies] ACCU info

[Walter Vannini]

As requested at Thursday's meeting, I'm posting information
about the upcoming ACCU meetings. It can also be found at
<http://www.accu-usa.org/Future-Meetings.html>.

March 15, 2006 - Kevlin Henney - A Critical View of C++ Practices
April, 2006 - Guido van Rossum - Python
May 10, 2006 - Scott Atwood - A Gentle Introduction to Unicode
June 14, 2006 - Greg Stein - Python at Google

Guido will probably be talking on April 5, but we haven't
confirmed that we have the room yet. The website will be
updated once it's settled.

Finally, here's the information for this month's talk
(also available at <http://www.accu-usa.org/>) for those
who might be interested

When:      Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Topic:     A Critical View of C++ Practices
Speaker:   Kevlin Henney
Time:      7:00pm
Where:     eBay Town Hall (next to PayPal/eBay)
              2161 North First St
              San Jose, CA 95131
Map:       <http://tinyurl.com/cdg5u/>
Cost:      Free
More Info: <http://www.accu-usa.org>

There are some C++ practices that are often recommended but
often deserve a more critical eye. Sometimes the apparent
need for a practice actually arises from a deeper cause,
and it is this cause that needs to be addressed rather than
the practice employed. In other cases the practice introduces
unnecessary complexity into a design, and may unnecessarily
restrict design options or cause problems itself.

This talk takes a look at a number of these practices and
examines what their issues are and what solutions and
practices C++ programmers should be considering as their
first port of call. The practices explored range from
Singleton to NVI (Non-Virtual Interface), from the default
assumption of virtual destructors in a base class to the
default use of reference-counted smart pointers, from
defensive programming to assertion abuse, from jumpy control
flow to exception abstinence, and from template
metaprogramming to overriding already implemented virtual
functions.

Kevlin is an independent consultant and trainer based in
the UK. He has developed and delivered training courses,
consultancy and software across a number of domains ever
since getting involved in professional software development
in the late 1980s. Kevlin is a regular speaker at conferences,
a contributor to the Boost libraries, and a past and present
columnist for various treeware and online magazines, including
C++ Report, CUJ and Reg Developer. Kevlin is also coauthoring,
with Frank Buschmann and Doug Schmidt, further volumes in
Wiley's Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture series.

Kevlin's consulting company is Curbralan Limited, which he
founded in 2000. Its url is <http://www.curbralan.com/>

The ACCU meets monthly. To suggest topics and speakers please
email Walter Vannini via walterv at gbbservices.com

Walter Vannini
President, Silicon Valley ACCU
<http://www.accu-usa.org/>
<http://www.gbbservices.com/>