The subtitle of the book '50 specific ways to improve your programs and designs' is a pretty good summary of what this book is all about. It's is very well structured, the table of contents summarizes each point in one sentence, together with the extensive and complete index it's very easy to use as a quick reference. But thanks to Meyers clear and oftentimes amusing style of writing it's also a joy to read from cover to cover. You'd be a fool if you didn't anyways, since you'd miss out on lots of excellent source code examples and very well stated arguments for each of the tips. Some of the tips may seem obvious, like item 5 which reads: "use the same form in corresponding uses of new and delete". Others like item 1: "prefer const and inline to #define" might seem pretty alien to seasoned C programmers/preprocessor magicians or performance freaks. After reading the author's arguments for his points you'll have a hard time defending your position, though (in the unlikely case that you are still not convinced, that is). Meyers does explicitly encourage critical thinking over blind following of the rules though, and in the tradition of Donald Knuth has promised a reward for every error discovered in his work.
How universally accepted these tips have become you can guess form reading the C++ newsgroups or noticing that they have been fully integrated into automatic source checking tools such as gimpel's PC-Lint. Professional programmers should know these 50 gems by heart - buy the book!
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