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The C++ Standard Library: Recap

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 the numerics section, the valarrays section proves to be a very interesting way to perform operations on vectors and matrices, and I'm surprised it's not used more often.

To make code internationalized, locales, character traits, and facets were described. I guess this doesn't mean too much to me at the moment since I only operate in the default C locale, but this is a good section to know when developing software for just about anywhere else in the world!

I am surprised the allocator section was so short. The section really only contained an instance of an allocator object along with several built-in C++ functions dealing with memory that has not been allocated (pointer to pointers) or constructed (actual objects). Maybe I will need to get my memory fix through some boost documentation or the books by Scott Meyers.

I also thought that it was interesting to know that folks in Nepal use 10.00.000 to represent 1,000,000.

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