I recently finished Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult. I really enjoyed it, especially for the way it examined conformity, fitting in, and life in general from many different angles and perspectives. The human aspect is great, but there are some distracting technical errors that I’m surprised made it through the proofreading and editing process. For example, the following (apparently) C++ program on page 314 (of my edition):

# include <stdio.h>
main ( )
{
    int time;
    for (time=0; time<infinity (1) ; time ++)
    { printf ("I love you|n"); }
}

Even I spotted a few problems with this, despite having minimal experience with C++. infinity() may be defined outside this excerpt, but it probably isn’t. There’s an infinity() function in the numeric_limits class template, but # include <limits> is conspicuously missing. And I don’t have any idea why a function to produce infinity would need 1 as an argument. Also, (this is probably a typo) |n at the end of the printed string is not going to have the desired effect.

These are minor, and most readers won’t notice, but I’m surprised that nobody thought to throw this into a compiler during the entire process of preparing the book for publication.