3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Would have been much more useful with a few additions, July 13, 2009
This review is from: STL Pocket Reference (Paperback)
The author states right near the front, on pg 2, that in order to keep this book down to pocket reference size it is not a detailed reference like
C++ in a Nutshell, nor does it cover C++ I/O streams or the C/C++ Standard Library. I fully agree on the necessity of that (the 'Nutshell' book is almost 800 pages), however, I would have found this pocket reference far more helpful if it had done two things differently:
1) Like a previous reviewer stated, include more examples. As my own example, the author does a good job of explaining some of the drawbacks of reverse iterators, as in this sentence: "The solution is to increment the reverse iterator, call base() to obtain the adapted iterator, and then pass the adapted iterator to erase." That's useful advice but--like a picture being worth a thousand words--a quick code example would speed up immediate understanding of the point being made, which is the purpose of a pocket reference. Code examples would also help clarify the often obtuse syntax of the STL. There are two reasons I pick up a pocket reference: to remind me what the name and operations of that call was to iterate backwards over a container, and to help me get the syntax right so the compiler stops whining. Unfortunately, the second part is missing from this pocket reference.
2) Include C++ ios_base. For one thing, the author already includes the basic_string template and I/O stream iterators. That's 2/3s of the way there already. From an academic standpoint, the ios_base stuff is low-level detail. From a practical programming view, I'm always referencing the ios_base format flags, open state, etc. when dealing with streams, even the STL I/O streams. It would be convenient if the necessary syntactical details were in the same pocket reference.
I don't regret buying this pocket reference. Like most of the O'Reilly pocket references, it's full of useful information. But I still need to refer to Stroustrup, the Nutshell book, etc. more often than not to really get a handle on exactly how I need to express my wishes to the compiler. Code examples would really help.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Must for the Software Developer Generalist, February 26, 2006
This review is from: STL Pocket Reference (Paperback)
The O'Reilly Pocket Reference series serves the need of software developers to quickly lookup how to code something that they don't do every day. The formula is quite strict. Like all of these books, this book is a hybrid of introduction, cookbook, and reference in a package that is small enough to easily fit several dozen on your bookshelf. What's good about the STL Pocket Reference is that it provides succinct descriptions of some very abstract concepts that are the lingua franca when dealing with the Structured Template Library. What's missing here is more sample code.
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2.0 out of 5 stars
samples r better, October 22, 2010
This review is from: STL Pocket Reference (Paperback)
Samples, flow-charts would serve best to simply get to the point as to what the template is intended to do. As a pocket ref., it should not have paragraphs but just get to the pt & that's best w/illustrative, demonstrative, cases/examples, etc., & whatever happened to flowcharts?
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