Preface

Boost is not just a collection of useful, portable, generic C++ libraries. It is an important incubator for ideas and concepts that make their way to the ISO C++ Standard itself. If you are involved in the development of software written in C++, then learning to use the Boost libraries would save you from reinventing the wheel, improve the quality of your software, and very likely push up your productivity.

I first came across the Boost libraries a decade ago, while looking for a portable C++ regular expressions library. Over the next couple of days, porting Perl and Korn Shell text-processing code to C++ became a breeze, and I took an instant liking to Boost. In using many more Boost libraries to write software since then, I often found myself digging deep into the documentation, or asking questions on the mailing list and online forums to understand library semantics and nuances. As effective as that was, I always sorely missed a book that would get me started on the most useful Boost libraries and help me become productive faster. This is that book.

Boost has a wide array of libraries for solving various kinds of programming tasks. This book is a tutorial introduction to a selection of over of the most useful libraries from Boost to solve programming problems effectively. The chosen libraries represent the breadth of cross-cutting concerns from software development, including data structures and algorithms, text processing, memory management, exception safety, date and time calculations, file and directory management, concurrency, and file and network I/O, among others. You will learn about each library by understanding the kind of problems it helps solve, learning the fundamental concepts associated with it, and looking at a series of code examples to understand how the library is used. Libraries introduced earlier in this book are freely used in later examples, exposing you to the frequent synergies that occur in practice between the Boost libraries.

As a collection of peer-reviewed, open source libraries, Boost draws heavily from community expertise. I firmly believe that this book will give you a strong practical foundation in using the Boost libraries. This foundation will reflect in the quality of the software you write, and also give you the leverage to engage with the Boost community and make valuable contributions to it.