It is not obvious what a suitable name for this part of the book should be. With a structure of the book that encompasses distinct domains (such as containers and higher-order programming), names are often palpable; except for what's covered in this partthose little things that we use all of the time: smart pointers, conversion utilities, and so on.
You can't really begin with a division called Miscellaneous, or Ubiquitous, or Frequently Used Libraries. It's truethey are all of these things, but it just doesn't convey their importance properly. Ergo, General Libraries, which I'm also hoping will focus on their omnipresence.
One thing that strikes me as odd is the way that we often regard these "simple" componentsutilities, if you likethat are of so much use to us. They get a lot of attention in books and articles, but it is surprisingly common to underestimate their value when it comes to selecting them (or creating them) for production code. Is it because we consider small components uncomplicated? Do we will ingly sacrifice flexibility on the basis that it's easy to create another small component just like it, but manually adapted to the exact problem at hand? If these are indeed the arguments, we are thoroughly deceiving ourselves. Two million instances of smart pointers in a program make the smart pointers critical, both in terms of efficiency and reliability. Twenty different implementations of common conversions in a program affects the time it takes to code them, but more importantly it also impedes maintainability. Systems are built on layers of abstraction, and the lower levels are often referred to as being comprised of data structures, algorithms, and utilities. If you agree with that, consider the impact of a change, or a bug, or unwarranted inflexibility in any of these small, insignificant, their-importance-forgotten utilities. Shiver. Utilities are vessels that traffic the veins of our programs. They are the oil in our engines of logic and the glue between our barriers of insulation. Enough of crummy analogies; let's just give them the credit they deserve, shall we? We will cover a wide variety of general libraries here, including smart pointers, conversions (both type conversions and lexical conversions), regular expressions, operators, static assertions, and more.
