Chapter 10. Containers, Iterators, and Algorithms

Containers (sometimes called collections) are a staple of computer programming. Every major programming language has fundamental containers, such as arrays or lists. Modern programming languages usually have an assortment of more powerful containers, such as trees, for more specialized needs.

The C++ library has a basic suite of containers (deques, lists, maps, sets, and vectors), but more important, it has generic algorithms, which are function templates that implement common algorithms, such as searching and sorting. The algorithms operate on iterators, which are an abstraction of pointers that apply to any container or other sequence.