Programmer Musings

Review of Beyond the C++ Standard Library

Beyond the C++ Standard Library
Bjorn Karlsson
Addison-Wesley, 2006

If you've been programming in C++ in the past few years you've probably heard of the Boost library. Boost is a large peer-reviewed set of classes and libraries designed to augment the C++ standard library. Beyond the C++ Standard Library serves as an introduction to some of the classes and libraries available through the Boost project.

Although the book does not cover every library developed by the Boost community, it does introduce many of the most generally useful. Several of the libraries covered in this book have already been accepted by the C++ Standard committee as official extensions to the standard library under Technical Report 1 (TR1). So these libraries will soon be coming to a C++ compiler near you.

Almost every chapter began with two important sections:

• How Does the X Library Improve Your Programs?
• How Does the X Fit with the Standard Library?

The first section shows the benefits that you and your programs will gain from using this library. This section serves to describe the library's reason for existence. In some cases (like the shared_ptr classes), the purpose of the library is to replace hundreds of slightly incompatible, possibly broken, shared pointer implementations with a set that really work. In other cases (like the Lambda library), the purpose may be to provide you with functionality that you may not have even believed was possible in C++.

The second section shows how the library integrates with or enhances the functionality in the standard library. This may be the biggest difference between the Boost libraries and those written in your average programming shop. Many of the people that work with the Boost project were part of the C++ standards process. This means that they truly understand the library. These sections describe difficulties with the standard libraries that the library is meant to overcome or ways where the standard library can be improved with the benefit of almost a decade of real-world use.

These two sections are probably the most important part of each chapter. The rest of each chapter provides an overview of the library and some examples of usage. The overview lists the important members of each class with descriptions. The examples are generally useful and clear.

This book is definitely more than a rehash of the documentation at the Boost site. Each library is covered with enough information and examples to get you started working with the library.

If you are thinking about using the Boost libraries in any of your projects, I would recommend this book. I would also recommend the book if you are interested in becoming familiar with the TR1 additions that will soon be part of the standard.