Important reminder just in the Preface :-)
Takeaway #1: "C and C++ are different: don’t mix them, and don’t mix them up"
Bjarne should have called it ++C.
Because people choose to use pre-increment by default instead of post-increment?
Why is that?
The PDP-11 that C originally targeted had address modes to support the stack. Pre-increment and post-decrement therefore did not require a separate instruction; they were free. After the PDP-11 went the way of the dodo, both forms took a machine cycle so it (mostly) became a stylistic issue. (The two operators have different semantics, but the trend to avoid side-effects in expressions means that both are most often used in a single expression statement like "++x;" or "x++;", so it comes down to your preferred style.)
Please explain what you mean by "a separate instruction".