Introducing the Boost libraries: the next breakthrough in C++ programming

Boost takes you far beyond the C++ Standard Library, making C++ programming more elegant, robust, and productive. Now, for the first time, a leading Boost expert systematically introduces the broad set of Boost libraries and teaches best practices for their use.

Writing for intermediate-to-advanced C++ developers, Björn Karlsson briefly outlines all 58 Boost libraries, and then presents comprehensive coverage of 12 libraries you're likely to find especially useful. Karlsson's topics range from smart pointers and conversions to containers and data structures, explaining exactly how using each library can improve your code. He offers detailed coverage of higher-order function objects that enable you to write code that is more concise, expressive, and readable. He even takes you "behind the scenes" with Boost, revealing tools and techniques for creating your own generic libraries.

Coverage includes

• Smart pointers that provide automatic lifetime management of objects and simplify resource sharing

• Consistent, best-practice solutions for performing type conversions and lexical conversions

• Utility classes that make programming simpler and clearer

• Flexible container libraries that solve common problems not covered by the C++ Standard Library

• Powerful support for regular expressions with Boost.Regex

• Function objects defined at the call site with Boost.Bind and Boost.Lambda

• More flexible callbacks with Boost.Function

• Managed signals and slots (a.k.a. the Observer pattern) with Boost.Signals

The Boost libraries are proving so useful that many of them are planned for inclusion in the next version of the C++ Standard Library. Get your head start now, with Beyond the C++ Standard Library.

© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 14 Ratings

OK, but start with the boost site itself - 2007-02-13
Reviewer Rating:
The book is well-written, clear, and honest to the title -- it truly is an intro. In fact, it's honest to the title a bit too much: I found it shallow. It is very much like most of the other recent C++ books (although it's one of the better-written ones), that is it has a distinct publish-or-perish taste to it, like a paper produced by another graduate student who doesn't really want to write it but has to. Not enough depth. It is, however, free from many sins of this PhD-indited flood: it's NOT pompous, it IS simple and clear, it has no pseudo-scientific pretense in it. I mean it's almost good; just not enough indepth.

Someone asked me recently, a bit confrontationally, well, you don't like anything, what's a good book then? No problem: books you tended to get a decade and more back; mostly written by practising professionals rather than CS PhD students; written by people motivated by either love of their work, or vanity, or greed -- all valid motivators, frequently resulting in good products. Unlike, I mean to say, the publish-or-perish imperative of the typical graduate student/newly minted PhD, who produce inflated and unnecessary, poorly written drivel about undeserving minutia. Abrash, Meyers, Stevens wrote good books. If you want STL, fine: Mark Nelson wrote a wonderful book on STL. It is unfortunately out of print (and behind the times a bit), but it's done right -- it really works on things, tweaks them, pokes them with a finger, looks inside, considers alternatives -- you end up really understanding the subject matter. Karlsson's book is well written, but along other books of the same kind (Josuttis, etc.) is limited to a verbal exposition of header files' contents with a teensy-weensy bit of sample code -- waaaaaay too little to be of much practical use. Whoever wants to write an STLish sorta book should check out Mark Nelson's book on STL and use it as a guide.

To summarise: The book is not bad by any means, but is superficial. Bjorn Karlsson writes very clearly, which is good and is not to be taken for granted -- and I hope Bjorn Karlsson will rewrite this book to make it more indepth, augment it with things like, you know: not only WHAT can be done, but HOW it is done (dig into the library itself: for example, how can you not want to stick your nose into the lambda library? It looks magical, I want to know how it's done... It is completely inadequate simply to mention what it can do, add a two-liner example, and be off to something else). OK, so do I recommend this book? Er... uhm... it's OK. A Quick Intro Guide, if you know what I mean. From a fifty-dollar book you'll want more.

So, I say, first go to boost and read what they've got there; I don't feel this book gets you more than the site itself -- jeez, what am I saying, of course it is less, it covers only a small part of the overall deal, but it's better written and more consistent. So, if you got fifty bucks to spare then get the book as well. I mean, it's an OK book. Were it sold for fifteen bucks, I'd give it five stars.

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PS. Bibliography is deficient: there's a couple of standard formats any style guide will describe; neither is used in here: what we have here is a kind of home-brewn summaries w/o year, publisher, etc., just the title and authors. Also, it seems that only books from Addison-Wesley made it into the bibliography (hmmm....)

Love Boost but not this book - 2007-05-07
Reviewer Rating:
This book doesn't add any value over reading the documentation that comes with Boost (and some of the Boost documentation is really terse). It fails to explain concepts clearly and there are almost no diagrams.

Hey, don't constantly try to convince me of boost - just teach it to me! - 2007-08-08
Reviewer Rating:
Lets distinguish: Boost is great, but this book is just not well written.
It is technically shallow, it is exhausting and boring to read and the authors attitude seems arrogant and is nerving.

I wouldn't buy this book again but recommend working through the docs on the boost website which are way better.

Readable, broad coverage of the core Boost libraries - 2007-02-23
Reviewer Rating:
Boost is a series of libraries for C++ that provides extra functionality missing in the C++ standard library. Unless you're forced to only use what's part of the current standard, you'll want to lean heavily on Boost. And even if you can't use it for some reason, a lot of it is passing into the next version of C++, so you may as well get familiar with it now.

This book covers the most immediately useful Boost libraries for the general audience. Topics include various smart pointers, including the vital shared_ptr, that makes STL container of polymorphic types much easier to deal with, extra casting operators, regular expressions, and the signal library, that provides a framework for implementing the observer design pattern.

A large chunk of the book is devoted to functional issues, covering the bind, lambda and functional libraries, which work together to substantially extend the functor capabilities of the STL. Code making use of these libraries are a good deal more powerful than what's currently in the standard library, more readable (although that's not necessarily saying much), and might even make the dream of writing loop-free code with functors a reality.

As an introduction to Boost, this is pretty good, which is just as well, given how little competition there is out there. Bjorn Karlsson writes well, and provides plenty of examples of the code in action. None of the examples are very long, however. In many places you'll find just enough to work out the syntax of the libraries, which you can then use with the API details that are also provided to get your own code working. It's not intended to be a very deep treatment of any of the libraries, however.

If you're looking for an introduction to Boost's most immediately usable code, this is a good purchase.

An OK book. - 2008-09-01
Reviewer Rating:
I feel that the book does an OK job of introducing the reader to several boos libraries. It seems to be a good resource for somebody who never used boost libraries before and wants to learn about them. However, the book seems to lack certain depth. A lot of space is wasted on listings of the header files or listing of all methods and fields in classes. This kind of information is readily available online and does not contribute much to the book. On the other hand, not enough info is given about the concepts that the libraries are based upon.

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