1.2 Overall Structure of the Book

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Our goal is to provide the information necessary for starting to use templates and benefit from their power, as well as to provide information that will enable experienced programmers to push the limits of the state-of-the-art. To achieve this, we decided to organize our text in parts :

• Part I introduces the basic concepts underlying templates. It is written in a tutorial style.

• Part II presents the language details and is a handy reference to template- related constructs.

• Part III explains fundamental design techniques supported by C++ templates. They range from near-trivial ideas to sophisticated idioms that may not have been published elsewhere.

• Part IV builds on the previous two parts and adds a discussion of various popular applications for templates.

Each of these parts consists of several chapters. In addition, we provide a few appendixes that cover material not exclusively related to templates (for example, an overview of overload resolution in C++).

The chapters of Part I are meant to be read in sequence. For example, Chapter 3 builds on the material covered in Chapter 2. In the other parts, however, the connection between chapters is considerably looser. For example, it would be entirely natural to read the chapter about functors (Chapter 22) before the chapter about smart pointers (Chapter 20).

Last, we provide a rather complete index that encourages additional ways to read this book out of sequence.

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