That's true, Eckel' books are also very good. He did a two day seminar and I finally got C++ from C (back in 1993) so I can highly recomend him as someone who explains things well. He does a lot of teaching by example. His second edition of "Thinking in C++" includes a lot of STL which is very important.

"C++ FAQ" by Cline, Lomow, and Girou, second edition. Herb Sutter's books, "Exceptional C++", "More Exceptional C++", and "C++ Coding Standards" The "C++ FAQ" is excellent about explaining why things work the way they do in C++ so you'll get the subtle differences. "C++ Coding Style" is also excellent in the 'Do it this way because that way is going to hurt.' The Exceptional * books are more advanced, deeper dives into specific features.

I know Texas has a license proceedure for "Software Engineer", so I expect this means that they have a license for "Software Architect" as well. I don't live there any more, the software engineer license was just coming out the last year I worked there. One of the more humorous requirements was that you had to be approved/nominated by some number of existing license holders even though there were exactly zero at the time.

I think your best arguement is that instead of testing for true/false, you're going to start with 'y' and 'Y', but then someone will decide that "T" and "F" should also work. So after that change sneaks into code (and maybe gets released) there will be this big panic while everyone tries to figure out why the application is broken. Eventually someone will figure out what happened and 't' and 'T' will be added to the test(s which may occur in a lot of places). Then six months later after everyone has forgotten what happened last time, someone will decide the '0' and '1' should also work. Then the next year someone will decide that all you need to do to internationalize the application to Mexico or to comply with some state mandate of supporting Spanish, is to allow "Si" and "No" so now that test will have to look for 't', 'T', 'y', 'Y', '1', 'x', 'X' (someone will think of a check box sooner or later..), 's' and 'S'. ... And although this could gurantee you employment for the next several years, the risk is that enough customers get tired of the constant updates that require a patch a few weeks later that they'll find another vendor. And of course the costs of redeploying each patch is going to seriously eat into the Christmas party.