Effective STL: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your Use of the Standard Template Library

Preface xiAcknowledgments xvIntroduction 1Chapter 1: Containers 11 Item 1: Choose your containers with care. 11 Item 2: Beware the illusion of container-independent code. 15 Item 3: Make copying cheap and correct for objects in containers. 20 Item 4: Call empty instead of checking size() against zero. 23 Item 5: Prefer range member functions to their single-element counterparts. 24 Item 6: Be alert for C++'s most vexing parse. 33 Item 7: When using containers of newed pointers, remember to delete the pointers before the container is destroyed. 36 Item 8: Never create containers of auto_ptrs. 40 Item 9: Choose carefully among erasing options. 43 Item 10: Be aware of allocator conventions and restrictions. 48 Item 11: Understand the legitimate uses of custom allocators. 54 Item 12: Have realistic expectations about the thread safety of STL containers. 58 Chapter 2: vector and string 63 Item 13: Prefer vector and string to dynamically allocated arrays. 63 Item 14: Use reserve to avoid unnecessary reallocations. 66 Item 15: Be aware of variations in string implementations. 68 Item 16: Know how to pass vector and string data to legacy APIs. 74 Item 17: Use "the swap trick" to trim excess capacity. 77 Item 18: Avoid using vector<bool>. 79 Chapter 3: Associative Containers 83 Item 19: Understand the difference between equality and equivalence. 83 Item 20: Specify comparison types for associative containers of pointers. 88 Item 21: Always have comparison functions return false for equal values. 92 Item 22: Avoid in-place key modification in set and multiset. 95 Item 23: Consider replacing associative containers with sorted vectors. 100 Item 24: Choose carefully between map::operator[] and map::insert when efficiency is important. 106 Item 25: Familiarize yourself with the nonstandard hashed containers. 111 Chapter 4: Iterators 116 Item 26: Prefer iterator to const_iterator, reverse_iterator, and const_reverse_iterator. 116 Item 27: Use distance and advance to convert

Scott Meyers is one of the world's foremost authorities on C++, providing training and consulting services to clients worldwide. He is the author of the best-selling Effective C++ series of books (Effective C++, More Effective C++, and Effective STL) and of the innovative Effective C++ CD. He is consulting editor for Addison Wesley's Effective Software Development Series and serves on the Advisory Board for The C++ Source (http://www.artima.com/cppsource). He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Brown University. His web site is http://www.aristeia.com.