Effective STL: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your Use of the Standard Template Library (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series) by Scott Meyers

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
It's hard to overestimate the importance of the Standard Template Library: the STL can simplify life for any C++ programmer who knows how to use it well. Ay, there's the rub. Even C++ programmers who routinely use the STL often find themselves encountering memory leaks, erratic behavior, and other annoyances.

What's needed is a book like Scott Meyers's legendary Effective C++: one that brings together the best techniques for writing code that works smoothly, quickly, and portably. Meyers has obliged. The 50 techniques in Effective STL get you "in the flow" of STL programming, making it easier to accomplish more, stay out of trouble, and even have more fun.

Meyers starts with guidelines that apply to all STL containers; then offers specific advice for specific container types. There's a chapter on vector and string, fine replacements for most dynamically allocated arrays, but ones with their own responsibilities. Meyers offers cogent ideas for dealing with iterators, algorithms, functors, and functor classes. He concludes with several invaluable "top-level" tips that help you use the right STL tool for every task, even when several are available. If you've been stumbling around in the dim light with STL, here's your halogen flashlight. (Bill Camarda)

Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer with nearly 20 years' experience in helping technology companies deploy and market advanced software, computing, and networking products and services. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2000 and Upgrading & Fixing Networks For Dummies®, Second Edition.

From the Publisher

C++'s Standard Template Library is revolutionary, but learning to use it well has always been a challenge. Until now. In this book, best-selling author Scott Meyers reveals the critical rules of thumb employed by the experts--the things they almost always do or almost always avoid doing--to get the most out of the library.

Other books describe what's in the STL. Effective STL shows you how to use it. Each of the book's 50 guidelines is backed by Meyers' legendary analysis and incisive examples, so you'll learn not only what to do, but also when to do it--and why.

Highlights of Effective STL include:

• Advice on choosing among standard STL containers (like vector and list), nonstandard STL containers (like hash_set and hash_map), and non-STL containers (like bitset).
• Techniques to maximize the efficiency of the STL and the programs that use it.
• Insights into the behavior of iterators, function objects, and allocators, including things you should not do.
• Guidance for the proper use of algorithms and member functions whose names are the same (e.g., find), but whose actions differ in subtle (but important) ways.
• Discussions of potential portability problems, including straightforward ways to avoid them.

Like Meyers' previous books, Effective STL is filled with proven wisdom that comes only from experience. Its clear, concise, penetrating style makes it an essential resource for every STL programmer.

Booknews

Explains how to combine STL components to take advantage of the library's design, describes common STL errors and how to avoid them, and discusses ways to optimize code. Guidelines give advice on choosing among standard STL containers, discuss portability problems, explain the proper use of algorithms and member functions whose names are the same but whose actions differ, and gives insight into the behavior of iterators, function objects, and allocators. Appendices discuss locales and case-insensitive string comparisons, and Microsoft's STL platforms. For STL programmers. Meyers has written several books on C++. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Forewords & Introductions

Table of Contents

Forewords & Introductions

-- Dr. Seuss, How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, Random House, 1957

I first wrote about the Standard Template Library in 1995, when I concluded the final Item of More Effective C++ with a brief STL overview. I should have known better. Shortly thereafter, I began receiving mail asking when I'd write Effective STL.

I resisted the idea for several years. At first, I wasn't familiar enough with the STL to offer advice on it, but as time went on and my experience with it grew, this concern gave way to other reservations. There was never any question that the library represented a breakthrough in efficient and extensible design, but when it came to using the STL, there were practical problems I couldn't overlook. Porting all but the simplest STL programs was a challenge, not only because library implementations varied, but also because template support in the underlying compilers ranged from good to awful. STL tutorials were hard to come by, so learning "the STL way of programming" was difficult, and once that hurdle was overcome, finding comprehensible and accurate reference documentation was equally difficult. Perhaps most daunting, even the smallest STL usage error often led to a blizzard of compiler diagnostics, each thousands of characters long, most referring to classes, functions, or templates not mentioned in the offending source code, almost all incomprehensible. Though I had great admiration for the STL and for the people behind it, I felt uncomfortable recommending it to practicing programmers. I wasn't sure it was possible to use the STL effectively.

Then I began to notice something that took me by surprise. Despite the portability problems, despite the dismal documentation, despite the compiler diagnostics resembling transmission line noise, many of my consulting clients were using the STL anyway. Furthermore, they weren't just playing with it, they were using it in production code! That was a revelation. I knew that the STL featured an elegant design, but any library where programmers are willing to endure portability headaches, poor documentation, and incomprehensible error messages has a lot more going for it than just good design. For an increasingly large number of professional programmers, I realized, even a bad implementation of the STL was preferable to no implementation at all.

Furthermore, I knew that the situation regarding the STL would only get better. Libraries and compilers would grow more conformant with the Standard (they have), better documentation would become available (it has -- check out the bibliography beginning on page 297), and compiler diagnostics would improve (for the most part, we're still waiting, but Item 49 offers suggestions for how to cope in the meantime). I therefore decided to chip in and do my part for the burgeoning STL movement, and this book is the result: 50 specific ways to improve your use of C++'s Standard Template Library.

My original plan was to write the book in the second half of 1999, and with that thought in mind, I put together an outline. But then I paused and changed course. I suspended work on the book, and I developed an introductory training course on the STL, which I then taught several times to different groups of programmers. About a year later, I returned to the book, significantly revising the outline based on my experiences with the training course. In the same way that my Effective C++ has been successful by being grounded in the problems faced by real programmers, it's my hope that Effective STL similarly addresses the practical aspects of STL programming -- the aspects most important to professional developers.

I am always on the lookout for ways to improve my understanding of C++. If you have suggestions for new guidelines for STL programming or if you have comments on the guidelines in this book, please let me know. In addition, it is my continuing goal to make this book as accurate as possible, so for each error in this book that is reported to me -- be it technical, grammatical, typographical, or otherwise -- I will, in future printings, gladly add to the acknowledgments the name of the first person to bring that error to my attention. Send your suggested guidelines, your comments, and your criticisms to estl@aristeia.com.

I maintain a list of changes to this book since its first printing, including bug-fixes, clarifications, and technical updates. The list is available at the Effective STL Errata web site,http://www.aristeia.com/BookErrata/estl1e-errata.html.

If you'd like to be notified when I make changes to this book, I encourage you to join my mailing list. I use the list to make announcements likely to be of interest to people who follow my work on C++. For details, consult http://www.aristeia.com/MailingList/.

SCOTT DOUGLAS MEYERS
STAFFORD, OREGON
http://www.aristeia.com/
APRIL 2001