languages and tools

Mr Ammeraal writes in a clear, easily understood style. He light on theory but very clear on application. However the book does not have the depth to be a refernce manual. In fact, he doesn't even cover the entire STL. The String class isn't even mentioned. The index is minimalistic. If you need to get a basic understanding of the STL and do not plan on manipulating character strings, this will get you started. If you need to understand the string class or are looking for a useful reference manual, stay away from this book.

This text was a great introduction to the use of STL, but it lacked depth in that it only covered how to use STL not how STL works, or how a programmer may derive their own STL classes from the base. It would have been very informative to get a look at a set of overridden classes such as a special iterator, a variant of an allocator class where a constructor with parameters is called instead of the base constructor, etc.. I haven't been able to find such an in-depth book yet. This book never claimed to explain these sort of questions, but it would have been extremely useful, say as the last chapter.