C++ Primer Plus

Associative Containers

An associative container is another refinement of the container concept. An associative container associates a value with a key and uses the key to find the value. For example, the values could be structures representing employee information, such as name, address, office number, home and work phones, health plan, and so on, and the key could be a unique employee number. To fetch the employee information, a program would use the key to locate the employee structure. Recall that for a container X, in general, the expression X::value_type indicates the type of value stored in the container. For an associative container, the expression X::key_type indicates the type used for the key.

The strength of an associative container ...