caelumvox - building on a cloud

The final 7 sections of The C++ Standard Library by Josuttis required lots of attention, but I am glad to have read this book cover to cover. This book is worth purchasing for Chapter 8 alone in its description of the function objects. The concept of stateful function objects is a powerful idea and can be used in conjunction with the standard library algorithms to produce some powerful behavior. Function objects provide a great introduction to the algorithms section in that many of the algorithms require function pointers or objects as arguments to execute on the item. Items in a container are typically modified using beginning and end iterators, or even pointers to contiguous arrays of memory. After the algorithms section, a special containers section described the bitset container. This is a container that will come in handy during protocol development at some point, but whether operations on the bitset are faster than simple C binary operations would be interesting to test. In th