general

I find this book, along with Stroustrup's "The C++ programming language" 95% of what one needs to program C++, effectively using the Standard Template Library. This book is organized excellently, with various subjects thoroughly covered and explained. It is suitable to be read as a tutorial, but is of much a better use as a reference, and is very much suited for that, with numerous tables and quick references allowing to find what you want quickly and efficiently. I also paid attention to the excellent index of this book, which never left me un-answered on an STL related question when I needed a quick ref/example to solve a problem. The examples in the book are good and very well explained, leaves place to ask for more (examples) in the next edition :)

Mr. Josuttis offers in this book an amazingly comprehensive guide to the often bewildering C++ standard library. I originally purchased this book looking for more STL information, and I was certainly not disappointed in that respect. STL descriptions account for nearly half of the book volume. However, as non-STL questions arose, I found myself digging into this book time and time again (questions about auto_ptr, string class, allocators, etc).

If you're a C++ programmer and do not already own a current (circa 1999 or later) library reference, do yourself and your code a favor and grab a copy of this book. C++ is an extremely scalable language. It's easy to use only knowing a small subset of the language and library features. Having a reference such as this one ensures that you'll be less likely to accidentally duplicate work that has already been done for you in the standard library.

As far as book organization goes, I'd say that the book does lean more towards "reference" rather than "tutorial", but I never believe a book that claims to be both anyhow. Anyone interested in a pure tutorial should buy a book specifically written with that in mind. For more experienced programmers not needing quite as much hand holding, however, the book does work as advertised.

Overall, I can't really recommend this book more enthusiastically.

as the title says, it is the best reference book on STL for beginners, once your are very comfortable with the concepts the book represent and C++ seems like a piece of cake, then you may want to get a book which gets deeper into the language.
Many examples is a plus, one minus is that it has many errors which is listed on the book web site that you can download and keep hand, be repaired to fix an error in every 10 or so pages