Re: [Boost-users] Boost book

Subject: Re: [Boost-users] Boost book
From: Roland Bock (rbock_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-08-16 06:42:29

Zachary Turner wrote:
> In any new edition of the boost book, I would like to see a strong
> emphasis on algorithms, containers, and utility functions.  Stuff that
> *everyone* can make use of in a wide variety of projects.  variant,
> boost, thread, filesystem, multi_array, any, accumulators, bind,
> function, circular_buffer, date_time, exception, foreach, random,
> enable_if, and probably a few others.
> 
> This could in theory take up about half the book.  For the next 25% I
> would like to see some discussion of libraries that are slightly less
> widely applicable, but still extremely useful and greatly simplifying
> when you need them.   asio, flyweight, iostreams, signals, numeric
> conversion, etc.   Note that use of asio implies neither asynchronous,
> nor i/o, despite the name.  The documentation and examples of asio
> also applies almost exclusively to i/o related tasks on the network.
> It would be useful to extend this to other things, for example
> asynchronous file reading / writing, or asynchronous computation, or a
> generic pipeline.
> 
> The last 25% I think could be dedicated to more specialized / advanced
> libraries.  graph, math, MPL, fusion, spirit, etc.

I agree with the above, except for the relative amounts of pages. I 
would rather think of a three volume collection. The reason is that the 
complex/specialized/advanced topics are, well, complex, specialized, 
advanced. And because they are, they always seem to be squeezed in last, 
not covered in enough detail.

For instance, currently I think I could make good use of MPL, but the 
tutorial looks rather abstract to me, and somehow I do not really get a 
grasp on it. I would love to see a more down-to-earth introduction 
(although maybe that is an oxymoron?).

Regards,

Roland