Meyers covers all corners of the STL: containers, iterators, algorithms, and functors. Even allocators are mentioned as well as common extensions to the STL, such as hash-based containers and smart pointers. To give you an idea of the topics discussed in Effective STL , let's look at some of its guidelines: 

• Item 30: Make sure destination ranges are big enough. This is commonsensical, yet every STL novice makes exactly this mistake at least once by creating an empty vector and passing its begin iterator as an output iterator to an algorithm. The result is a program crash. From then on novices usually know that they must use insert iterators instead.

 
• Item 32: Follow "remove"-like algorithms by "erase" if you really want to remove something. The "remove"-like algorithms are notorious misnomers in the STL because "remove" does not remove anything; it just copies all valid elements to the beginning of the sequence and returns an iterator to the garbage at the end. Anybody who has ever used a "remove" algorithm has noticed it; it's described in every good STL book. 

The most amusing item is Item 6, which explains "C++'s most vexing parse." This has actually nothing to do with the STL itself; it is a C++ language feature. However, it's mentioned in this book because most people encounter this problem for the first time in their life when they start using the STL. The problem is that under certain circumstances the C++ compiler interprets an object declaration as a function declaration. It's a problem similar to the following: when a programmer says T t(); then he usually intends to default-construct an object t of type T . This would be true in Java, but in C++ it means that the programmer declares a function t that takes no arguments and returns an object of type T . Item 6 explains a similar, yet more complex case that comes up when you pass unnamed temporaries as arguments to constructors, which is absolutely common in conjunction with the STL. The resulting compiler diagnostics are devastating. If you want to know more, read the book. 

By and large Effective STL: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your Use of the Standard Template Library is a very sound and readable book; at times it is downright entertaining. It is worth reading after some exposition to the STL and is certainly not meant as an introduction to the STL. Much of its content might be rather obvious if you're an expert user of the STL. But then, who is? For the inquisitive STL user, this book will definitely be enlightening and fun to read. 

Angelika Langer develops and teaches classes on Java, C++, multithreading, and internationalization. She is an internationally recognized speaker and served on the ANSI/ISO C++ Committee from 1993 to 1998. Klaus Kreft is a software architect and senior consultant with 15+ years of experience in industrial software development. He currently works for Siemens Business Services in Germany. Langer and Kreft are authors of "Standard C++ IOStreams and Locales" (Addison-Wesley, 2000) and are columnists for the C/C++ Users Journal.