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Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

Huh. The ISBN shown at the top of the page (currently "9780136816485") appears to be incorrect. That seems to be the ISBN for "A Tour of C++" from 2022. The ISBN for this book is, according to the Amazon product page[1], "9780138308681".

[1]:https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Principles-Practice-Using...

Edit: emailed Mr. Stroustrup and he just replied to say that the bad ISBN has been corrected.

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Already teaching you about the maintainability of tightly coupling different parts of your system before you've even opened the book

It would have been awesome if that ISBN issue were an actual ISBN re-use issue. I've run into issues coupling my system's design to the assumption that ISBNs uniquely identify a single edition of a single book. The intent of ISBNs are to be unique, but mistakes are made and resellers lose track or straight up abuse some ISBNs.

Not just that but when ISBNs were first introduced, it was common thought that they were used for cash register price scanning rather than computer-controlled inventory, so a number of early books had ISBNs re-used by publishers and it wasn't caught because they were meant to be the same price. These days you often see two barcodes on books, one is the ISBN and the other is the price.

Darn, I don’t think Bjarne sends $2.56 checks.

I think you just earned yourself a coveted check for `sizeof(attaboy)`, and I’m jealous.

Just being able to say that I got a response from Bjarne Stroustrup is reward enough in its own right!

Actually he does respond to emails and he is responsive to constructive feedback from my experience.

I still remember "reading" his entire 1000-page C++ book for the sole purpose of finding an error on it, for which I was handsomely rewarded with a $32 check from Bjarne. Still not cashed. Good times...

Even Stroustrup falls prey to copy&paste programming.

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