Book Image

C++17 STL Cookbook

By : Jacek Galowicz
Book Image

C++17 STL Cookbook

By: Jacek Galowicz

Overview of this book

C++ has come a long way and is in use in every area of the industry. Fast, efficient, and flexible, it is used to solve many problems. The upcoming version of C++ will see programmers change the way they code. If you want to grasp the practical usefulness of the C++17 STL in order to write smarter, fully portable code, then this book is for you. Beginning with new language features, this book will help you understand the language’s mechanics and library features, and offers insight into how they work. Unlike other books, ours takes an implementation-specific, problem-solution approach that will help you quickly overcome hurdles. You will learn the core STL concepts, such as containers, algorithms, utility classes, lambda expressions, iterators, and more, while working on practical real-world recipes. These recipes will help you get the most from the STL and show you how to program in a better way. By the end of the book, you will be up to date with the latest C++17 features and save time and effort while solving tasks elegantly using the STL.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Introduction


The C++ standard library comes with a wide range of standard containers. A container always contains a collection of data or objects. The cool thing is that containers can be used with practically any kind of object, so we just need to pick the right containers for our specific application. The STL gives us stacks, automatically growing vectors, maps, and so on. This way we can concentrate on our app and don't need to reinvent the wheel. Knowing all containers well is therefore crucial for every C++ programmer.

All containers the STL provides can be categorized as follows, which is explained in detail in the subsequent subsection:

  • Contiguous storage
  • List storage
  • Search trees
  • Hash tables
  • Container adapters

Contiguous storage

The simplest way to store objects is to put them just next to each other in one large chunk of memory. Such memory can be accessed in a random access manner in O(1) time.

The easiest way to do that is using std::array, which is just a wrapper around normal C-style...