What part of STL knowledge is must for a C++ developer? - stl

Question

I have good knowledge of C++ but never dwell into STL. What part of STL I must learn to improve productivity and reduce defects in my work?
Thanks.

Answer 1

I have good knowledge of C++
With all due respect, but no – you don’t. The standard library, or at least large parts of it (especially the subset known as “STL”) is a fundamental part of C++. Without knowledge of it you don’t know very much about C++ at all.
In fact, much of the modern design of C++ (essentially everything since the 98 version) was guided by design considerations stemming from the standard library, and much of the changes in the language since then are changes to the standard library. If you take a look at the official C++ language description a good part of the document is concerned with the library.

Answer 2

Usually the first reaction (at least in my opinion, of course) for people who have not worked with the STL before is to get upset with all the template code. So I would start by studying a little bit on this subject.
In the case you already know template fundamentals I would recommend taking a brief look over an STL design document. This is actually the second stage of hassle for people not yet familiar with it. The reason for this is that the STL is not designed under a typical object oriented paradigm, but under the generic programming paradigm.
With this in mind, a good start could be this introductory article. The terms used throughout the STL components are explained there. Please notice that is a relatively old text focused on the SGI implementation (which predates the C++ standard and incorrectly mentions, for example, the hash based containers as part of it). However, the theory is still valid.
Well, if you already know most things I've said up to this point, just jump directly to the topcis the others provided.

Answer 3

You mention about improving your productivity and reduce defects. There are general guidelines that you can use for this. I assume c++11, and I mention a bit more than stl (smart pointers):
Use containers, they will manage memory for you. You get rid of new for C arrays and later having to delete them, for example.
For dynamic arrays, use std::vector. You also have hashtables in std::unordered_map and balanced trees with std::map. There are more containers, take a look here.
Use std::array instead of plain C arrays whenever you can: they never decay to pointers when passing as arguments to functions, which can avoid very disgusting bugs.
Use smart pointers and forget forever for a naked new and its matching delete in code.
This can reduce errors far more than you would expect, especially in the presence of exceptions.
Use std::make_shared when possible. You can use it to allocate a shared_ptr directly as an argument to a function that takes a std::shared_ptr. With a naked new this is not possible.
Use algorithms instead of hand-coded loops. The code will be far more readable and usually more performant.
With this advice your code should look closer (but not necessarily equal or semantically equivalent) to C# or Java, in which manual memory management disappears. This is even better than garbage collection in many scenarios, since you have deterministic guarantees for when a resource will be freed.

Answer 4

I'd say the algorithms from <algorithm> will really clean up your code and at the same time make your code more concise.
Obviously, knowledge of all the containers will help you to optimize the bottlenecks of your code caused by a certain choice of container which is not optimal (but be sure to profile first).
These are pretty much the basics and they will help you a lot to make more robust code.
After that you can delve into smart pointers like std::shared_ptr which are almost always better than regular pointers (in my case, at least).

Answer 5

I think can start with containers(vector, list) and alghorithms(binary search, sort).
And as Jesse Emond wrote, the more you know, the better you live)))