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Reviewer: Martin D. Schweitzer

There have been three key events in my programming career—events that changed the way that I programmed and thought about programming. The first was when I started using the C programming language, the second when I started using C++, and the third was when I started using the STL (Standard Template Library). The STL is a lot more than a library of useful containers and routines: it represents a way of thinking about programming and breaking down problems in order to code solutions. When I first downloaded the STL (I think it was from the HP site in around 1995), the only documentation seemed to be the 50 or so pages of Postscript. This consisted mainly of a dense mathematical semantic notation explaining the library. One of the first books to become available was the STL tutorial and reference guide by Musser and Saini. Reading this book gave me a far better appreciation of how the STL worked and why it was useful. This book has now been released in its second edition, and there is now an extra author (Derge), and more than 100 extra pages. The book appears to have been typeset in &tex; (or &latex;) and the authors have used a literate programming tool for their examples. The book is divided into three sections. Section 1, which covers about two-fifths of the book, is a tutorial introduction to STL. This section will be useful for any C++ programmer that has a reasonable knowledge of C++ but who has not ever used the STL. The examples are complete enough to explain the material, yet not so long that they obscure the points that they are trying to make. One of the good things about the examples is that each example is presented as a complete program so that the reader can either download the code or copy it from the book and get it to compile and run. The second section, which is called “Putting It Together”, contains some complete programs which give some good examples of using the STL. This section covers about one-fifth of the book. The final section is the reference, which covers the last two-fifths of the book. This section is quite well organized and would be an adequate reference for someone using the STL. The book covers each of its topics fairly thoroughly and with authority. I would have liked to have seen more work being put into the appendix. When I tried to look up some keywords such as bind2nd and reference semantics (I wanted to see if they discuss reference semantics versus value semantics), I could not find direct references in the index (I found bind2nd by going to one of the sections on Binders). I would also have liked to see more on ways of extending the STL, and maybe a section on some existing extensions, such as hash_maps. I think that anyone buying this book will find it useful, but probably not invaluable. There are many other books out there now that cover a lot of the same material. This book covers the STL, the whole STL, and nothing but the STL. Online Computing Reviews Service