An STL must-have | Effective STL: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your Use of the Standard Template Library |...

Myers Never Disappoints | Effective STL: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your Use of the Standard Template Library | Scott Meyers

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	• Effective STL: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your Use of the Standard Template Library Scott Meyers Addison-Wesley Professional, 2001 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 37 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Deserves five stars

I would suggest this book anyone dealing with STL. It provides extensive best practice input for the experienced C++/STL developer.

An STL must-have

This is the third of Meyers' must-have works that any competent C++ developer is likely to have within reach of his keyboard. It is perhaps not as ubiquitous as the two "Effective" books, as some developers think that using STL is not such a good idea, especially those restricted to DOS and its pernicious spawn. (To steal a Meyers coinage.) If you have such a developer on your team, buy them a copy of Visual Basic and send them home immediately. STL is an open standard and is understood industry-wide; STL is available in a variety of implementations from a variety of competing sources; STL is an achievement of rare brilliance and will help you to make your code shorter, more efficient and more expressive. Meyers shows you how.

Meyers' books do not conform to any easy categorisation, and this book is no exception. They are not textbooks. They are not introductory works. They are not reference works. Despite all this, they are unique in the C++ world and you will find only a minority of developers who do not own a couple and refer to them often. They are of unique utility and you ought to have copies. I read mine afresh every year or two. What they are is a catalogue of lessons from a man who is deeply involved with the C++ language, who is involved in development of its published standard and who has a wealth of production experience and knows the pitfalls. STL is the STANDARD template library. If you use a mainstream compiler you probably already have an implementation and you ought to have a good reason before using something else.

The STL basically breaks down into containers, iterators, algorithms and functors and their adapters, and the overall layout of the book reflects this ontology. Additional sections are provided for vector and string, and for associative containers. A final section covers "Programming with the STL", meaning practical use of it in day-to-day code design. Particularly useful is the advice on deciphering compiler errors generated during use of the STL, which can be - er - Byzantine. To say the least. "Salad of identifiers" springs to mind, in fact. Another one in the "Programming" section which I have learned to take to heart is to prefer STL algorithms to hand-written loops.

Some of this material has been overtaken with the advent of the Boost library, which Meyers himself praises highly. Boost's function binders and lambda functions have made working with containers and algorithms simpler, more interesting and expressive, for instance. However, I would strongly advise anyone moving into Boost to familiarise themselves with this material first, as the two technologies interoperate and Boost borrows heavily from the STL. It also requires the greater expertise to master, so this is the obvious next-to-last step.

A highly entertaining and eminently useful book on an aspect of C++ that few of us take best advantage of.

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Myers Never Disappoints

This is another home run by Scott Myers. This book will immediately improve your use of the STL in terms of both exception safety and program efficiency. He breaks down every worthwhile container, algorithm et c and shows you exactly what you need to know to maximize its effectiveness. I highly recommend this, along with any other Scott Myers C++ book to any programmer out there.

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High quality, correct but you do not need it.

I have this book for about 4 years now. I have been through the book many times myself, from a view point of a novice programmer to a view point of a more experienced coder. I have finally decided to write up a review for this book, it can be summed up as follows:

1. This book is high quality, printed on high quality papers. It is expensive, however, for such a short book.

2. The book is correct, to the very least, if not useful. This is in fact head and shoulders above many other books in the market right now. I consider most of the programming books for the dummies.

3. As you read more books, you realize that nearly all the best books are written by an elite circle. In the case of C++, the circle is the people surrounding Stroustrup. They all know each other and promote the works of each other. Much like in the academic game. But seriously, once you have identified this elite circle, read nothing but the works published by them.

4. In my opinion, to understand STL to the fullest, you have to have a deep knowledge in the Data structures and Algorithms. Otherwise, you could only take the advised best practices for granted without knowing why exactly they are the best practices. And once you know the Data structures decently, the best advices become simply trivia.

5. Therefore, if you are looking at this book, despite its high quality, I think what you really need is a good book in Data structures and Algorithms. Without that, you won't understand this book, and with that, you do not need this book any more.

6. I would have rated this book highly when I was a novice in programming. But when I began to learn more and more about this trade (especially after studying a couple of classic books in Data structures and Algorithms), this book becomes less significant. Anybody with decent graduate level Computer Science knowledge should see that most items in this book are nothing but trivia.

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Could be so much more...

I had to give this book three stars because the author is capable of so much more. Effective C++ is very tightly written and like the other Professional Computing Series books that follow the form of itemizing topics into digestible chunks, it works nicely as a desktop reference once you are familiar with the content.

Effective STL does not. Nearly none of the items are under three pages and many of the items are over six pages. It's not because there is so much to each item (e.g. it should only take 1 page to explain why map::insert is more efficient than map::operator[] for adding new elements). It's because each item contains a lot of information only tangentially related to the item that could easily be made into their own two-page items. Much of the time I have to flip back to the start of an item to remind myself what the topic actually is. All of this makes the book relatively useless as a quick desk reference because the ideas all blend together in memory and there is no way to look them up. You may remember a solution to a problem you are working on exists in this book but it is possible (if not likely) that you will have to read ten or more pages, and several items, flipping back and forth, trying to find it.

I hope that Scott Meyers wasn't just doggedly sticking to the number 50 for consistency's sake but I can't think of any other reason why this book was not better organized into 100 items or an asymmetrical 103 (heaven forbid!) items.

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(Pearson Education) Explains STL, Standard Template Library, and how to use it. Offers STL programmes at varying levels of skill techniques to master the efficiency of STL and STL programs, with insights into functions, allocators, and iterators, among other concepts. Softcover. DLC: C++ (Computer program language).

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

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