16Overview of the C++ Standard Library
The most important library that you will use as a C++ programmer is the C++ Standard Library. As its name implies, this library is part of the C++ standard, so any standards-conforming compiler should include it. The Standard Library is not monolithic: it includes several disparate components, some of which you have been using already. You may even have assumed they were part of the core language. All Standard Library classes and functions are declared in the std namespace, or a subnamespace of std.
The heart of the C++ Standard Library is its generic containers and algorithms. Some people still call this subset of the library the Standard Template Library, or STL for short, because originally it was based on a third-party library called the Standard Template Library, which used templates abundantly. However, STL is not a term defined by the C++ standard itself, so this book does not use it. The power of the Standard Library is that it provides generic containers and generic algorithms in such a way that most of the algorithms work on most of ...