Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++, 2nd Edition

21. Algorithms and Maps

“In theory, practice is simple.”

—Trygve Reenskaug

This chapter completes our presentation of the fundamental ideas of the STL and our survey of the facilities it offers. Here, we focus on algorithms. Our primary aim is to introduce you to about a dozen of the most useful ones, which will save you days, if not months, of work. Each is presented with examples of its uses and of programming techniques that it supports. Our second aim here is to give you sufficient tools to write your own — elegant and efficient — algorithms if and when you need more than what the standard library and other available libraries have to offer. In addition, we introduce three more containers: map, set, and unordered_map.

21.1 Standard library ...