[pkj]

I had taken a course designed by him at stanford: object oriented programming from a modeling and simulation perspective. I also have the lecture notes for the follow-up course. It was mentioned that the course was based on his real world experience doing c++ programming in academia and startup that he sold to Cisco. It was very clear from the beginning that the course was radically different from any programming course I had seen. Highly opinionated in almost every page. There was rarely anything that he repeated from any standard c++ books. I enjoyed the course, though only about 5% still remains with me. I have worked in teams using c++ extensively to manage $Billion+ products, and can attest that the course definitely had some value. Also, I had interviewed with a C++ team in Cisco 4K catalyst group and they mentioned they were still building on the c++ platform laid by Cheriton's group ( a decade later).

Talking about any disadvantages, I can say that you need someone of Cheriton's ability to really guide you during the initial build-up of the project. His ideas of having the compiler do a lot of checking to avoid bugs in the code later are really cool. But the learning curve is pretty steep. Newer paradigms (since the course was originally designed) like STL, BOOST, and tips in Effective C++/STL etc can replace some of the concepts he espouses. But he is pretty clear that some of them are really inferior. It might be true for some cases, but I have usually used them in production just fine..