What's wrong with cplusplus.com?
Posted
by
Kerrek SB
on Programmers
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Published on 2011-06-29T11:40:39Z
Indexed on
2011/06/30
0:30 UTC
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This is perhaps not a perfectly suitable forum for this question, but let me give it a shot, at the risk of being moved away.
There are several references for the C++ standard library, including the invaluable ISO standard, MSDN, IBM, cppreference, and cplusplus. Personally, when writing C++ I need a reference that has quick random access, short load times and usage examples, and I've been finding cplusplus.com pretty useful. However, I've been hearing negative opinions about that website frequently here on SO, so I would like to get specific:
What are the errors, misconceptions or bad pieces of advice given by cplusplus.com? What are the risks of using it to make coding decisions?
Let me add this point: I want to be able to answer questions here on SO with accurate quotes of the standard, and thus I would like to post immediately-usable links, and cplusplus.com would have been my choice site were it not for this issue.
Update: There have been many great responses, and I have seriously changed my view on cplusplus.com. I'd like to list a few choice results here; feel free to suggest more (and keep posting answers).
As of June 29, 2011:
- Incorrect description of some algorithms (e.g.
remove
). - Information about the behaviour of functions is sometimes incorrect (
atoi
), fails to mention special cases (strncpy
), or omits vital information (iterator invalidation). - Examples contain deprecated code (#include style).
- Inexact terminology is doing a disservice to learners and the general community ("STL", "compiler" vs "toolchain").
- Incorrect and misleading description of the
typeid
keyword.
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