Thread: Book or site for learning Boost?

  1. #1
    and the hat of sweating
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    Book or site for learning Boost?

    Hi,
    I'm wondering if anyone has a recommendation on a good book or site for learning how to use the Boost library?

    I downloaded & built Boost a few years ago, but haven't really done much with it. There were virtually no instructions on how to properly build it back then (hopefully it's easier now), so I had to do a lot of Googling before I could get it to compile properly.

    I'd like a book that has everything from properly compiling Boost, to what each of the classes do and how/when to use them.

  2. #2
    Cat without Hat CornedBee's Avatar
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    Try "Beyond the C++ Standard Library: An Introduction to Boost".

    There's also special books for the MPL ("C++ Template Metaprogramming") and the BGL (forgot the name).

    The weird thing is that I never had any problems compiling Boost.
    All the buzzt!
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  3. #3
    Frequently Quite Prolix dwks's Avatar
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    I had so much trouble compiling boost, though some of that was because I ran out of hard drive space. I thought 250MB of disk space free would be more than enough to compile Boost, which was at the time an 11MB download (I think), but no . . .

    Then I couldn't compile boost because some subsystem depended on something, but I didn't care about that subsystem, and just wanted the rest of it to work. Eventually I ended up compiling each source file by hand. I didn't need to, of course -- I'm sure make or configure had options to do this. But I did, and it was a pain . . .
    dwk

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    boost uses an own build system now, called bjam. I dont know about the differences to make. but it's really easy to build boost with it following the instructions on the web site

    I'd like a book that has everything from properly compiling Boost, to what each of the classes do and how/when to use them.
    Have you looked on the documentation of the boost subproject web sites? I found it pretty useful for the parts I used so far
    Last edited by pheres; 11-07-2007 at 05:10 PM.

  5. #5
    Cat without Hat CornedBee's Avatar
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    In my personal opinion, Boost.Build (bjam and a support files written in bjam's language) is pretty much the bee's knees.
    All the buzzt!
    CornedBee

    "There is not now, nor has there ever been, nor will there ever be, any programming language in which it is the least bit difficult to write bad code."
    - Flon's Law

  6. #6
    and the hat of sweating
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    Quote Originally Posted by pheres View Post
    boost uses an own build system now, called bjam. I dont know about the differences to make. but it's really easy to build boost with it following the instructions on the web site

    Have you looked on the documentation of the boost subproject web sites? I found it pretty useful for the parts I used so far
    Last time I looked, the documentation for each class was maintained by the person who originally wrote the class, and therefore had no consistency (or quality standards) from one class to another. Some had great documentation, while others were completely useless.

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