Question

I know this could be seen as subjective off-the-cuff (thus a poor question), but bear with me.

Boost has recently become available on the project on which I’m working, and I don’t have much experience with it. Boost has so many parts and features that it’s hard to know where to get started in learning it – especially since I’ll be trying to learn it while making production code.

So, I would greatly appreciate it if someone could list around 3 to 5 features which are very useful in general, every-day programming and state why they’re useful. I’m not asking you which is best, or trying to get a debate – I just want to know some good features to start learning and using immediately. I don’t need code samples either, I’ll be more than happy to research how to use the features myself after I know which ones are sensible to start learning now.

I’ll accept any answer with a concise list of features that are sensible 🙂

Answer 1

format and lexical_cast are great for string manipulation, I find them invaluable. I use them every day.

bind is great for ad hoc functors, you’ll find it is reused throughout many of the boost libraries.

multi_index fills the gap of when you need the same data in two search structures at once, it is very handy at times. Keep it out of your headers though.

type_traits defines useful traits for template specializations.

signals is a signal/slot mechanism implementation, great for event driven designs.