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I have spent the last several years fighting tooth and nail to avoid working with C++ so I'm probably one of a very small number of people who likes systems programming and template meta programming but has absolutely no experience when it comes to the STL and very little C++ template experience.
- Does anyone know of a good document for getting started using STL?
I'd prefer PDF or something else I can kill trees with and I'm looking for something more along the lines of a reference than a tutorial (although an 80/20 split would be nice there).
I ended up using the docs from here, pringing them out via a PDF driver and tacking them together with this idea. Now I'm off to print them off 2-up double sided (190 pages even so, but I have >1k pages in my quota and only 4 months till graduation).
Here is the reference I'm using. SGI , Offline Download
Here is another reference
If you want dead trees, maybe you'd be better off with a proper book? I found this one indispensable: The C++ Standard Library: A Tutorial and Reference by Nicolai M. Josuttis
In general, it is best to use the documentation that comes with your C++ toolchain. For general-purpose docs, I like the GNU libstdc++ documentation.
If you're looking for a proper reference, then, truly, nothing can beat
"ISO/IEC 14882:2003 - Programming Language C++" - after all, it's the primary source. I'm not aware of any legal way to get the PDF for that for free. You can buy the PDF from ISO, but they ask ~$300 for that, way too much in my opinion. A cheaper option is to go to one of the national standard bodies that make ISO - they republish those standards under their own name (but otherwise unchanged), and usually the prices are more sane. The cheapest paper version I'm aware of is published by British Standards Institute - available on Amazon for $85. The cheapest download PDF seems to be $40 from the shop of the Australian member organization.
If you are going to do C++, then you need the book "The C++ Programming Language" by Stroustrup. It makes an excellent reference to the STL. I refer to it all the time for all things related to algorithms and containers.
If you need more of a hands-on tutorial approach, then try the Josuttis book as recommended by Mark Ransom.
And once you are done reading all the references suggested here, be sure to take a look at "Effective STL" by Scott Meyers.
This link surely is old, here is a link for downloading STL documentation in different formats thought will be helpful for enthusiasts like me:
http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee/fun/STL-doc/
