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STL Tutorial and Reference Guide by David Musser & Atul Saini Recommended

ISBN: 0-201-63398-1)       Publisher: Addison-Wesley       Pages: 400pp       Price: £29-95

Categories:   advanced c++

Reviewed by Francis Glassborow in C Vu 8-5 (Jul 1996)

Essentially there are three parts. The first part is a tutorial that leads you through the principles and concepts of the STL . By the time you have worked through this part you should have a good understanding of how the STL has been designed.

I recently had a conversation with a programmer who was disappointed that the STL was such a low level set of components. He said that he would never want to use something at such a level. I suggested that these were the components out of which his higher level application constructs could be built. He seemed to think this was a waste, why not build the high level elements directly. I think the answer to this is shown in part II of this book where the authors work through a number of examples of using STL components to develop particular programs. STL isn't at the level of circuit boards, it is much more equivalent to simple chips, op amplifiers, logic elements etc. You use them to put together the elements that the final assembler will slot together to form a product. They need versatility because they are for general purpose use.

The final part of the book is the reference guide. This is the part which will need some revision when the STL finally stabilises. It is at least 95% correct already but it will eventually need to be brought into line with the final tweaking that WG21/X3J16 ARE still doing.

If you are serious about your C++you need to work through the first part of this book and have a compiler that provides you both the STL and proper support for it. Unfortunately many C++programmers will be remain ignorant of the C++Standard Library and the STL in particular just as many C programmers are ignorant of the Standard C Library. They will waste much time re-inventing such things as container classes. Don't be one of them.