This chapter was a quick tour of several Boost libraries that help you do important programming chores, such as parsing command lines, creating type-safe variant types, handling empty values, and performing compile-time checks.

Hopefully, you have appreciated the diversity of libraries in Boost and the expressive power they lend to your code. In the process, you would have also become more familiar with compiling code that uses the Boost libraries and linking to the appropriate libraries as needed.

In the next chapter, we will look at how you can deterministically manage heap memory and other resources in exception-safe ways using various flavors of Boost's smart pointers.