Jacek Galowicz - C++17 STL Cookbook

Over 90 recipes that leverage the powerful features of the standard library in C++17

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First published: June 2017

Production reference: 1230617
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

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Jacek Galowicz obtained his master of science in electrical engineering/computer engineering at RWTH Aachen University, Germany. While at university, he enjoyed working as a student assistant in teaching and research, and he participated in several scientific publications. During and after his studies, he worked as a freelancer and implemented applications as well as kernel drivers in C and C++, touching various areas, including 3D graphics programming, databases, network communication, and physics simulation. In recent years, he has been programming performance- and security-sensitive microkernel operating systems for Intel x86 virtualization at Intel and FireEye in Braunschweig, Germany. He has a strong passion for modern C++ implementations of low-level software, and he tries hard to combine high performance with an elegant coding style. Learning purely functional programming and Haskell in recent years triggered his drive to implement generic code with the aid of meta programming.

Arne Mertz is a C++ expert with over a decade of experience. He studied physics at the university of Hamburg, and he switched careers to become a software developer. His main background is in financial enterprise applications written in C++. Arne works at Zuhlke Engineering, Germany and is known for his blog, Simplify C++! (https://arne-mertz.de) on clean and maintainable C++.

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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.