- This C++
Reference Page contains a lot of reference material, including a
good STL section.
- Austern, Matthew A: Generic Programming and the STL,
Addison Wesley, 1999. This book contains three parts: Introduction to
Generic Programming, Reference Manual: STL Concepts, and Reference
Manual: Algorithms and Classes. It's a good book to keep coming back
to as you get more and more comfortable with the STL.
- Glass, Graham and Brett
Schuchert: The STL <PRIMER>, Prentice Hall PTR, 1996.
This was one of the first books on the STL. It is therefore now
seriously out of date, and should not be your first reference on the
subject. But it was a good read and extremely helpful in its day,
deserves a place on this list, and can be browsed when you want to
see how things were in the good ol' days. Also, the "algorithm
iterface key" used in our STL
Algorithms Classified by Purpose page is based on the one from
this text.
- Josuttis, Nicolai: The C++ Standard Library, Second Edition,
Addison Wesley, 2012. Pretty much anything you want to know about the C++
Standard Library (including the STL) should be in here somewhere.
- Lippman, Stanley B, Josee Lajoie, and Barbara E. Moo: C++
Primer, Fifth Edition, Addison Wesley, 2013. This excellent book
has been updated for C++11 and includes material on the latest STL
enhancements.
- Meyers, Scott: Effective STL, Addison Wesley, 2001. The
third volume in Meyers' excellent "Effective" trilogy gives some good
and not-found-everywhere advice for using the STL.
- Musser, David R, Gillmer J Derge, and Atul Saini: STL
Tutorial and Reference Guide, Second Edition, Addison Wesley,
2001. This text contains both tutorial and reference sections, as
well as a section in which the authors show how to "solve some simple
but nontrivial programming problems using STL components". The first
author was one of those at the front end of STL development.
- Plauger, PJ, Alexander A Stepanov, Meng Lee and David R Musser:
The C++ Standard Template Library, Prentice Hall PTR, 2001.
Here are some names you should recognize. If these guys can't tell
you what you need to know, you're in big trouble. This book is a
reference and thus quite technical, and it contains useful (and
readable) discussions that accompany the presentation of the formal
details, but it's not really a tutorial for beginners, unless you
happen to be a very with-it beginner.
- Schildt, Herbert: STL Programming from the Ground Up,
Osborne/McGraw-Hill, 1999. One of the original books on the STL, and
though it is outdated now I'd suggest picking up a copy if you find one
in a baragain bin (probably because I have a sentimental attachment ...
it was the book I "cut my STL teeth on"). Schildt has a number of other
books on C and C++ as well, and all are good sources of useful examples
and helpful discussion.