Rating: 
Summary: Good for Beginners and Intermediate Users
Review: As an advanced programmer, I must say that I'm disappointed that the level of information provided is not as deep and meticulous as I had hoped.Additionally, both the index and the overall organization of the book leave much to be desired. The book, however, is a valuable reference for beginning and intermediate programmers. It explains the STL (Standard Template Library) from the ground up, explaining when, where, and why you would use any particular aspect of the STL, how to use the STL, and sufficient examples to understand correct syntax. This book also contains a detailed section of applying the STL to real-life programming examples. Furthermore, the book also contains a comprehensive reference guide for quick and easy access to pertinent information about STL aspects you frequently use and modestly comprehend. If you are a beginning or intermediate programmer, this book is worth adding to your collection.
Rating: 
Summary: Buy it! Read it! Learn it!
Review: Excellent book. Buy it. Read it. Learn it. If you don't buy another STL book, buy this one. It is one of the best.
Rating: 
Summary: Good, but poorly organized
Review: I am afraid that among all this 5-star stimations I would look stupid, but my major criteria for the book is whether you feel the stuff after reading. No, I am not. You will not find "pseudo real-world" examples, but the same a-la "hello world" is repeated again and again. Yet another book about STL. Not the worst one, but definitely far from being perfect. I do not really understand what is the big deal to explain STL - this is not rocket science!
Rating:
Summary: Excellent overview and introduction
Review: I found this to be a wunnerful book given that I wasn't very experienced using STL when I read it. It provided the necessary hooks for me to make better sense out of the two extremes on the continuum (see two references below). The reference section could be arranged more usefully, but this is a minor carp. I highly recommend this one for folks trying to get their minds around STL. This is an accessible cover-to-cover read.
Gotta qualify the numerical rating. I consider this a 10 for the non-expert STL audience trying to understand STL. Probably more of a 6 for experienced users who are more interested in reference manuals.
I find that as I get more and more familiar with STL, I look more and more frequently at the two books below. However, these books are now vastly more useful after reading "the STL Tutorial and Reference Guide".
"The STL <Primer>" by Glass and Schuchert. Excellent brief synopsis of the interfaces, not much supporting detail but very handy. I reach for this one first when I want to use something in STL. If I need more details, I look in...
"C++ Programmer's guide to the Standard Template Library" by Mark Nelson, very detailed in its treatment of most *all* of the parts of STL. Thick, but something that provides all the details has to be.
Rating: 
Summary: My god this book is terrible
Review: I must have missed something. This book not only fails to teach you STL, but it is not useful as a reference either. Let's say, for example, you want to learn how to use the STL priority queue. Good luck with this book. You are better off reading the STL header files. Please, save your money, whoever wrote this book must have taken some technical documents and randomly pasted them together. Ugh. Just further proves that just because someone knows alot on a subject doesn't mean they can teach others about it.
Rating: 
Summary: Not an especially good reference or tutorial
Review: I originally learned STL from this book, but found it to be considerably more tedious than most other books on programming I have used. The learning process was simply more painful than it had to be. In addition, it is not an especially good reference in my humble opinion. Even though I have gone on to use STL extensively in my C++ programming, I still find it unnecessarily difficult to get the information I want out of this book when I've forgotten or overlooked some detail about STL. I have lent this book to several other engineers and programmers in my company, and have generally received unenthusiastic responses when they returned the book. Most of the people who borrowed this book returned it and purchased a different book for themselves. In summary, although this isn't a terrible book, I do not recommend it. I agree with an earlier review that there must be better out there. My fellow programmers who borrowed this book and then bought a different one for themselves certainly seem to think so.
Rating:
Summary: disorganized, lack of sample code, not much there
Review: I was hoping this book could shed some light on this subject, and I was wrong. If you look for some concrete examples then this book isn't it.
Rating:
Summary: Well-written coverage of most of what you need to know
Review: I'm astonished by the abundance of IMO very ignorant reviews of this book. 4.5 stars might be the ideal rating, but given all the other excessively negative reviews, I opted for 5 rather than 4. This is a lucid, very well-written book, with plenty of sage advice. It introduces the concepts gently, but without excessive redundancy or hand-holding. The examples are well chosen, and illustrate their points (although in some places, there is a bit much duplication for my taste, but that too serves to illustrate the uniformity of STL). This book is clear, to the point, and covers most of the essential subjects amply (it's s bit weak on storage management, but as the authors mention, rarely will you need to write your own allocators). And it includes a minimal - but perfectly functional and adequate - reference section. The presentation is well organized, and procedes at a moderate pace. As one who has written a couple data structure libraries of his own, and who has taken to heart (in spite of C++ being a mess of a language, and templates being fundamentally a kludge) the sophistication of STL, I can safely say it incorporates many ideas that other programmers need to know, and probably do not appreciate fully. This book does a good job explaining some of the deeper motivations behind STL's design. As they say, a true master makes it look simple, and that's what both the authors of STL and this book achieve. It is true that the book is slightly out of date, but not with regard to the fundamentals. All of the key ideas you learn from this book apply to the latest revisions and any programmer worth his weight in, uh, salt can easily figure out the minor differences. I recommend this book to those who like insight, and succinct clarity, and who eschew the typical computer book, full of facts, hype, and verbosity, but little illumination, progressing by baby steps. This is a good solid book that will get you up to speed quickly on all the important ideas in STL, and many of its basic usage idioms.
Rating:
Summary: Well-written coverage of most of what you need to know
Review: I'm astonished by the abundance of IMO very ignorant reviews of this book. 4.5 stars might be the ideal rating, but given all the other excessively negative reviews, I opted for 5 rather than 4. This is a lucid, very well-written book, with plenty of sage advice. It introduces the concepts gently, but without excessive redundancy or hand-holding. The examples are well chosen, and illustrate their points (although in some places, there is a bit much duplication for my taste, but that too serves to illustrate the uniformity of STL). This book is clear, to the point, and covers most of the essential subjects amply (it's s bit weak on storage management, but as the authors mention, rarely will you need to write your own allocators). And it includes a minimal - but perfectly functional and adequate - reference section. The presentation is well organized, and procedes at a moderate pace. As one who has written a couple data structure libraries of his own, and who has taken to heart (in spite of C++ being a mess of a language, and templates being fundamentally a kludge) the sophistication of STL, I can safely say it incorporates many ideas that other programmers need to know, and probably do not appreciate fully. This book does a good job explaining some of the deeper motivations behind STL's design. As they say, a true master makes it look simple, and that's what both the authors of STL and this book achieve. It is true that the book is slightly out of date, but not with regard to the fundamentals. All of the key ideas you learn from this book apply to the latest revisions and any programmer worth his weight in, uh, salt can easily figure out the minor differences. I recommend this book to those who like insight, and succinct clarity, and who eschew the typical computer book, full of facts, hype, and verbosity, but little illumination, progressing by baby steps. This is a good solid book that will get you up to speed quickly on all the important ideas in STL, and many of its basic usage idioms.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent tutorial / Decent (albeit abridged) reference
Review: If you are just starting, you can't lose with this. A three part book - philosophy and overview of generic programming / putting STL to use (an anagram machine) / reference. Well laid out, easy to follow, brings you from zero knowledge to above average ability quickly. I hesitate to give it five stars because it fails to mention several large chunks of STL that you could immediately use, including the functionals and some very useful pieces (strings (with iostreams), bit sets, fstreams, locales, limits, etc). Aesthetically pleasing next to the Gang-o-Four (Design Patterns - also by Addison-Wesley).
| 
