The C++17 STL Cookbook will teach you how to get the most out of C++17 by providing coding recipes that combine the C++ language and its standard library, the STL. Indeed, this book uses as much STL as possible, which is worth a bit of explanation.
C++ is such a great and powerful language. It allows us to hide complex solutions behind simple high-level interfaces but, at the same time, to write low-level code where high performance and low overhead really matter. The ISO C++ Standard Committee works hard on improving the C++ standard. C++11 brought a lot of great features to C++, and so did C++14 and C++17.
As of today, C++ is a language that provides language features and standard library facilities for sophisticated standard data structures and algorithms, automatic resource management pointers, lambda expressions, constant expressions, portable thread control for concurrent programming, regular expressions, random number generators, exceptions, variadic templates (the part of C++ for expressing template types is even Turing-complete!), user-defined literals, portable filesystem traversal, and so much more. This giant bunch of features makes it a general-purpose language ideal for implementing high-quality and high-performance software in all fields of the software industry.
However, many C++ programmers eagerly learn C++ as a language but put its standard library, the STL, in the second place. Using the C++ language without the help that the standard library provides often leads to programs that look like C with classes, but not what modern programs in the 21st century should look like. This is very sad because using C++ like that means dropping half its strength.
In the C++11 edition of his book, The C++ Programming Language, Bjarne Stroustrup writes, "Please remember that those libraries and language features exist to support programming techniques for developing quality software. They are meant to be used in combination--as bricks in a building set--rather than to be used individually in relative isolation to solve a specific problem."
This is exactly what this book and its recipes are about. All the recipes in this book are designed to be as near as possible to real-life problems, while at the same time, they do not rely on any external libraries other than the STL. This way, it is very simple to play around with each of them, without having to do confusing setup work. I really hope that you find inspiration in the recipes and, maybe, find some of them to be nice standard building blocks for solving higher-level problems with this great programming language.
