C++ Plus Data Structures, 6th Edition

Appendix E: The Standard Template Library (STL)

Overview

The STL is a subset of the ISO/ANSI C++ standard library. The STL provides three kinds of facilities for C++ programmers to use: containers, iterators, and generic algorithms.

An STL container holds other objects, much like the containers you have studied in this text: lists, stacks, queues, and so on. Specifically, the STL supplies many useful container classes, some of which are the following:

list	A sequential-access list that can be traversed both forward and backward.
vector	An abstraction of a one-dimensional array providing, as expected, random access to the array elements.
stack	A stack, with the usual LIFO access.
queue	A queue, with the usual FIFO access.
deque ...