Rainer Grimm - The C++ Standard Library

Rick Audet

Senior Engineer, Dolby Laboratories

Odin Holmes

CEO/CTO at Auto-Intern GmbH

Ramon Wartala

Director Technology at Performance Media GmbH

Rainer Grimm

I work as a software architect, team lead, and instructor since 1999. In 2002, I created a further education round at my company. I give seminars since 2002. My first seminars were about proprietary management software, but seminars for Python and C++ followed immediately. In my spare time, I like to write articles about C++, Python, and Haskell. I also like to speak at conferences. I publish weekly on my English Modernes Cpp and the German blog, hosted by Heise Developer.

Since 2016, I am an independent instructor giving seminars about modern C++ and Python. I published several books in various languages about modern C++ and concurrency, in particular. Due to my profession, I always search for the best way to teach modern C++.

The C++ Standard Library is a quick reference to the standard library of the current C++ standard C++20 ISO/IEC 14882:2020. C++20 has more than 1800 pages and is the next big C++ standard after C++17. C++17 is neither a big nor a small C++ standard. C++14 is a small addition to C++11. C++11 had more than 1,300 pages and was published 2011. That was 13 years after the first and only C++ standard C++98. Of course, there is also C++03, published in 2003. But C++03 is considered a bug fix release.

The goal of this quick reference is to provide a concise reference to the C++ standard library. This book assumes that you are familiar with C++. If so you will get the most benefit out of this book. If C++ is new to you, you should start with a textbook about core C++. Once you have mastered a textbook about the core language, you can make your next big step by reading this book. To make your job easier, I have provided a lot of short code snippets to connect theory and practice.

The book should be a reference for C++, and should, therefore, have an index. Leanpub does not support the creation of an index. So Ive made it based on regular expressions, naming conventions, a lot of python magic - dont blame me - and a long, long table which I had to split for each page. Here is the problem. The index is only fully available in the pdf format of the book.

I promise only a few conventions.

I use boxes for unique information, tips, and warning.

Information text.

Tip description.

Warning description.

I dislike using directives and declarations because they hide the namespace of the library functions, but because of the limited length of a page, I have to use them from time to time. I use them in such a way that the origin can always be deduced from the using directive (using namespace std;) or the using declaration (using std::cout;).

Only header files of the featured functionality are shown in the code snippets. True or false is displayed in the output code snippets for boolean values; and
is not used.

To be concise, I only present short code snippets in this book. The name of the entire program is in the first line of the code snippet.

I call instances of fundamental data types values, which C++ inherited from C. Instances of more advanced types which often consist of fundamental types, are called objects. Objects are typically instances of user-defined types or containers.

At first Alexandra Follenius, who was the lector at OReilly for the German book C++ Standardbibliothek. You may have guessed that the German book is the ancestor of this book. For my book C++ Standardbibliothek Karsten Ahnert, Guntram Berti, Dmitry Ganyushin, Sven Johannsen, Torsten Robitzki, Bart Vandewoestyne, and Felix Winter were very valuable proofreaders. A lot of thanks to all of them.

For translating this book to English, I started a request in my English blog: www.ModernesCpp.com. I received a much higher response than I expected. Special thanks to all of you, including my son Marius, who was the first proofreader.