February 2005
Beginner to intermediate
272 pages
4h 53m
English
A short description of the standard template library (STL) cannot do its design justice. What follows is an appetizer to encourage you to study the STL in depth.
The STL isn’t really a library. It’s an inspired idea and a set of conventions.
The STL consists of three major kinds of components: containers, algorithms, and iterators. Containers contain and organize elements. Algorithms perform operations. Iterators are used to access the elements of a container. This is nothing new, as many traditional libraries have these components, and many traditional libraries are implemented with templates. The STL’s inspired idea is that containers and the algorithms that operate on them need no knowledge of each other. ...
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