What this book covers

Chapter 1, Introducing Boost, discusses how to set up a development environment to use the Boost libraries. We cover different ways of obtaining Boost library binary packages, building them from source for different configurations, and using them in a development environment.

Chapter 2, The First Brush with Boost's Utilities, explores a handful of Boost libraries for common programming tasks that include dealing with variant data types, handling command-line arguments, and detecting the configuration parameters of the development environment.

Chapter 3, Memory Management and Exception Safety, explains what is meant by exception safety, and shows how to write exception-safe code using the different smart pointer types provided by Boost and C++11.

Chapter 4, Working with Strings, explores the Boost String Algorithms library for performing various computations with character strings, the Boost Range library for elegantly defining subsequences, the Boost Tokenizer library to split strings into tokens using different strategies, and the Boost Regex library to search for complex patterns in text.

Chapter 5, Effective Data Structures beyond STL, deals with the Boost Container library focusing on containers not available in the C++ Standard Library. We see the Pointer Container library for storing dynamically-allocated objects in action, and use the Boost Iterator library to generate various value sequences from underlying containers.

Chapter 6, Bimap and Multi-index Containers, looks at bidirectional maps and multi-index containers—two nifty container templates from Boost.

Chapter 7, Higher Order and Compile-time Programming, delves into compile-time programming using Boost Type Traits and Template Metaprogramming libraries. We take a first look at Domain Specific Embedded Languages and use Boost Phoenix to build basic expression templates. We use Boost Spirit to build simple parsers using the Spirit Qi DSEL.

Chapter 8, Date and Time Libraries, introduces the Boost Date Time and Boost Chrono libraries to represent dates, time points, intervals, and periods.

Chapter 9, Files, Directories, and IOStreams, features the Boost Filesystem library for manipulating filesystem entries, and the Boost IOStreams library for performing type-safe I/O with rich semantics.

Chapter 10, Concurrency with Boost, uses the Boost Thread library and Boost Coroutine library to write concurrent logic, and shows various synchronization techniques in action.

Chapter 11, Network Programming Using Boost Asio, shows techniques for writing scalable TCP and UDP servers and clients using the Asio library.

Appendix, C++11 Language Features Emulation, summarizes C++11 move semantics and Boost's emulation of several C++11 features in C++03.