Title: 16 Web Sites to Review

By now I had expected to be able to extend this column with (possibly brief) reviews of sites that I have listed previously or ones of your own choosing. I must confess to being a little mystified by the complete lack of response. Every year about fifty members take the time to review at least one printed book (some review many more than that). That is a lengthy task and one that is greatly appreciated by the many thousands of people who check our book reviews.

Reviewing a web site would generally take much less time. The benefits to others of pointing them to accurate and informative sites is seriously valuable (actually having links to authoritative sites will increase the rating of www.accu.org under the evaluation mechanism developed by IBM, but that is another story.)

If you use the Web as an information resource please take a little time each month to write up at least one site and email it to me. If you come across very bad sites please write those up as well, keeping people away from the bad is almost as important as pointing them to the excellent.

Now to a few more sites that need visits and reviews:

An interesting link about time and the C programming language:

www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/c-time/

Which reminds me, I could do with articles on this subject both for novices and for experts.

For information about Design by Contract try:

www.eiffel.com/doc/manuals/technology/contract/page.html

This is definitely a subject for an article in a future issue of Overload (when its target readership becomes programming specialists rather than C++ specialists). If DbC is in your area of expertise, now is the time to start writing an article to extend the knowledge of your fellow members.

For over fifty 'articles' related to various C++ questions:

check out the guru of the week items at:

www.cntc.com/resources/

Note that GotW items range in difficulty between fairly simple and close to 'research' topics

mediaLib.

Seems to be a well designed public API supporting such things as:

Fourier domain processing, matrix algebra, texturing, MP3, etc., etc.

mediaLib was designed (by Sun Microsystems?) to be portable and is OS-independent, though Sun of course is most interested in the Sparc/VIS implementation.

www.sun.com/sparc/vis/mediaLib.html

www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/9904/sunflash.990414.3.html

(Shareware) Software Exploration Tools

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/jmsxt/

Not only would I be interested in a review of the site but I would also like reports on your experiences of using any of the tools that are available from this site.

Publicly available Standards Information:

http://anubis.dkuug.dk/dkuug/std-www

Actually this site does not need a review as to quality, but a short article describing the range of material available would be of considerable value in making our members better informed as to what is openly available to them.

For code implementing smart pointers/containers.

www.kinetica.com/home/yon/4dev/

This time a review of the quality of the contents would be useful.

Conclusion:

There is plenty more out there, so I hope next time this column will have contributions from you.