Matthew Wilson (author)

Matthew Wilson is a software engineer and author. Specializing in C/C++, he may be best known for his time as columnist and contributing editor for C/C++ Users Journal, but has also written articles for a number of other publications, as well as publishing two books on C++: "Imperfect C++" (2004), and "Extended STL, volume 1" (2007).

Wilson has founded, and contributed substantially, to several open-source organisations, most notable of which are the Pantheios logging API library and the STLSoft C++ Libraries. He is director of the Australian software engineering consultancy company Synesis Software.

Wilson's work, and publications, are characterised by an unwillingness to accept the limitations imposed by technology, or by received wisdoms. His libraries are crafted to wrest every cycle from the processor without sacrificing safety or expressive power, and his books are written to answer every last question a reader may, or may not, come up with.

He believes that you should not use C++ unless your software needs to be fast.

He is not a member of Boost.

Books

Wilson's first book, "Imperfect C++: Practical Solutions for Real-Life Programming", was published in 2004. At over 550 pages, it addresses many of the imperfections of the C++ language, tackling such diverse subjects as multidimensional arrays, threading, the shim concept, optimised string concatenation, and C++ properties.

This was followed in 2007 with "Extended STL, volume 1: Collections and Iterators", which is the first of two volumes covering STL extension theory and techniques.

According to the site for "Extended STL", Wilson's next book will be called "Breaking Up The Monolith: Advanced C++ Design without Compromise", and will be published in 2009.

Libraries

Wilson has written, or co-written, the following libraries:
* STLSoft C++ Libraries
* b64 Base-64 conversion library
* FastFormat efficient formatting library
* [http://flecxx.org/ flecxx] abstraction harmonizer library
* [http://openrj.org/ Open-RJ] Record-Jar API
* Pantheios C++ logging API library
* [http://recls.org/ recls] recursive file-system search
* [http://shwild.org/ shwild] shell-compatible wildcards
* [http://vole.sourceforge.net/ VOLE] C++ COM/Automation driver
* [http://xtests.org/ xTests] Unit testing framework

References

* cite book
first = Matthew
last = Wilson
coauthors =
authorlink =
year = 2004
title = Imperfect C++: Practical Solutions for Real-Life Programming
publisher = Addison-Wesley
id = ISBN 0-321-22877-4

* cite book
first = Matthew
last = Wilson
coauthors =
authorlink =
year = 2007
title = Extended STL, Volume 1: Collections and Iterators
publisher = Addison-Wesley
id = ISBN 0-321-30550-7

External links

* [http://synesis.com.au/articles.html List of articles]
* [http://www.artima.com/weblogs/index.jsp?blogger=bigboy Artima blog]
* [http://stlsoft-musings.blogspot.com STLSoft-related blog]