boost users : articles

From: toon (toon_at_[hidden])
Date: 2001-09-27 16:30:28

To help (potential) users get familiar with the many libraries in Boost 
and all the functionalities these libraries provide, we could maybe 
publish a short article once a week/forthnight about real-world problems 
and how you can solve them using Boost.

The articles should be short. This makes it easier for new users to read 
through the _whole_ article and thus pick something up. It's also 
important that the article focuses on one real-world problem. This will 
help the reader understand the relevance of the article. Next it should 
only be an introduction. If the reader is really interested, he can read 
the documentation of the library.

Different categories of articles can be envisioned.
1) articles about _one_ specific library
(novice level)

2) articles about combining different libraries
(reader needs to have basic knowledge of discussed libraries)

3) articles describing extension of the STL in Boost.
(reader needs some experience with STL)

In cat. 1, we could for instance discuss boost.tuple.
Cat. 2 could for instance feature an article about combining 
boost.function and boost.tuple or boost.function and boost.bind
Cat 3 would describe e.g. iterator_adaptors, bind, ...

I learned about the libraries by regularly reading the documentation of 
a library I'm not familiar with during some free time. During 
development, I then remember this stuff and try to apply it.
That is the process I would like to mimic with these articles, without 
people having to read all the documentation first (I'm not saying the 
current documentation is not good, on the contrary. But it's not at 
novice level)

If it helps, I can provide some real-life cases where iterator_adaptors 
   , tuples, ... helped me a million.
I'm especially fond of iterator_adaptors which many times saved me a lot 
of development-time and memory footprint (thanks David and Jeremy, 
really superb library)

toon