Customer Reviews

Using the STL: The C++ Standard Template Library

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The book gives good, general descriptions and examples for many aspects of STL. However, it's marred by a lot of mistakes and it appears the book is hastily published. Although it's a 98 edition, the author and the publisher didn't bother to upgrade the script using a later STL version, and you will find a lot of materials out-dated. There is a severe lack of details in some important aspects, such as exceptions and the repercussion of memory allocation errors to containers. That's especally dissapointing.

As has been noted in other reviews of this book, there are a substantial number of editing and typographical errors which are distracting. However, the flaws are almost all minor enough and obvious enough that most readers will have no trouble detecting and correcting them (not that the reader should be expected to edit the book, of course). If you can get past the mistakes, the content of the book is really quite good. While it does not fully explain every aspect of the current STL, it does cover almost everything in enough detail that you get a good feel for what the STL allows you to do and how it allows you to do those things. Words, concepts, algorithms, and implementations are all clearly explained. Some portions are missing (see other reviews), but what is included is covered well.

This book is a good introduction to STL. It clearly explains big-O notation, and explains the container, iterator, and algorithms in STL. It has lots of working simple programs to demonstrate the different ideas. It has some editing mistakes, but not too many. It is lacking a little on more advanced topics: There is no discussion of how to create multi-dimensional arrays. The major problem I have with this book is that it doesn't really address storing C++ objects in containers as pointers.

I found this book to be an easy read on the STL where a lot of others are just reference manuals on the subject. The author does a good job of giving examples of usage for many of the STL components as well as some more complex, closer-to-real-life examples towards the end of the book. The information was well organized which made the book enjoyable to read. There's a refernce at the end of the book, too. The only negative criticism I have is that some of the details weren't talked about or given examples (and some of the examples required a little massaging to compile with MSVC). If you have another book that goes into the details of every container and function or you make use of some other reference material (I wouldn't count the VC++ 5.0 documentation on STL as a good source, blah), this is a great book to learn from.

I recently needed to do some work with the STL and at the time, this looked like the best book available based upon the editor's description and the comments I saw here.

I needed to do some work with the sorting algortihms, and some basic collections. I also wrote some wrappers around the strings and collection for MFC programmers so they could use the MFC CString, CArray, CMap, and CList based classes without a dependance on MFC. I had no problems doing that with the book.

I think there is a book out now on STL, called "STL from Scratch" or something like that. I am a big fan of Jesse Liberty and since that book has his endorsement I would have considered that book if it had been available at the time.

My recommendation: I think this is a good book, but I would check out the other book I mentioned first and see what kind of reviews it has.