Organization of This Book

This book is divided into three main parts, each containing libraries pertaining to a certain domain, but there is definitely overlap. These divisions exist to make it easier to find relevant information for your task at hand or to read the book and find related topics grouped together. Most of the chapters cover a single library, but a few consist of small collections.

The typesetting and coding style is intentionally kept simple. There are a number of popular best practices in this area, and I've just picked one I feel that most people are accustomed to, and that will convey information easily. Furthermore, the coding style in this book purposely tries to save some vertical space by avoiding curly braces on separate lines.

Although the examples in most books make heavy use of using declarations and using directives, this is not the case here. I have done my best to qualify names in the interest of clarity. There is an additional benefit to doing so in this book, and that is to show where the types and functions come from. If something is from the Standard Library, it will be prefixed with std::. If it's from Boost, it will be prefixed with boost::.

Some of the libraries covered by this book are very extensive, which makes it impossible to include detailed explanations of all aspects of the library. When this is the case, there's typically a note stating that there is more to know, with references to the online documentation, related literature, or both. Also, I have tried to focus on the things that are of the most immediate use, and that have a strong relation with the C++ Standard Library.

The first part of this book covers general libraries, which are libraries that are eminently useful, but have no other obvious affinity. The second discusses important data structures and containers. The third is about higher-order programming. There's no requirement to read about the libraries in a specific order, but it certainly doesn't hurt to follow tradition and start from the beginning.

Before getting to the in-depth look at the covered Boost libraries, a survey of each of the currently available Boost libraries will introduce you to the Boost libraries and give context for those that I'll address in the rest of the book. It gives an interesting overview of the versatility of this world-class collection of C++ libraries.