Introduction to Boost

Because you are reading this book, I expect that you are somewhat familiar with the Boost libraries, or that you at least have heard of Boost. There are a great number of libraries in Boost, and there are few, if any, that will not be of at least some interest to you. As a result, you will most definitely find libraries you can put to immediate use. The Boost libraries range over a wide variety of domainsfrom numeric libraries to smart pointers, from a library for template metaprogramming to a preprocessor library, from threading to lambda expressions, and so on. All of the Boost libraries are compatible with a very generous license, which ensures that the libraries can be freely used in commercial applications. Support is available through newsgroups, where much of the activity of the Boost community takes place, and there is at least one company that specializes in consulting related to the Boost libraries. For an online introduction to the Boost community, I strongly suggest that you visit Boost on the Web at www.boost.org.

As of the time of this writing, the current Boost release is 1.32.0. In it, there are 58 separate libraries. The following pages introduce all 58 of those libraries sorted by category and give a short description of what the libraries have to offer. For the libraries not covered in detail in this book, have a look at the documentation provided at www.boost.org, which is also where you go to download the Boost libraries.