Explains the central ideas underlying generic programming - concepts, modeling, and refinement - and shows how these ideas lead to the fundamental concepts of the STL: iterators, containers, and function objects. This book helps you to extend the STL, create algorithms, and write more efficient and effective code to be used across platforms.

Austern's book introduces you to the generic programming paradigm and to the most important instance of that paradigm--the C++ Standard Template Library (STL). This book reveals that the STL is more than a set of convenient container classes: It is also an extensible framework for generic and interoperable components. Austern explains the central ideas underlying generic programming--concepts, modeling, and refinement--and shows how these ideas lead to the fundamental concepts of the STL: iterators, containers, and function objects.