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 STL does not only contain data structures but also algorithms, of course. While data structures help store and maintain data in different ways with different motivations and targets, algorithms apply specific transformations to the data in such data structures.

Let's have a look at a standard task, such as summing up items from a vector. This can be done easily by looping over the vector and summing up all the items into an accumulator variable called sum:

 vector<int> v {100, 400, 200 /*, ... */ };

 int sum {0};
 for (int i : v) { sum += i; }

 cout << sum << '\n';

But because this is quite a standard task, there is also an STL algorithm for this:

cout << accumulate(begin(v), end(v), 0) << '\n';

In this case, the handcrafted loop variant is not much longer, and it is also not significantly harder to read than a one-liner which says what it does: accumulate. In a lot of cases, however, it is awkward to read a 10-line code loop just to realize, ...