A Complete Guide to Standard C++ Algorithms

Preface

This book will not start with a personal story or some other flowery recollections. Instead, to protect your time, I will lay out precisely what this book is about and who am I to be qualified to write this book. Hopefully, this will help you decide whether reading this book is a good use of your time.

About this book

This book is a complete guide to the C++ standard algorithms. However, that might not mean much to you, so let me unpack this statement.

This book is a guide, as opposed to a reference, meaning that instead of describing every detail, the book concentrates on examples and pointing out notable, surprising, dangerous, or interesting aspects of the different algorithms. Furthermore, unlike a reference, it is supposed to be read, for the most part, like a book in sequential order.

C++ already has one canonical reference, the C++ standard, and for quick lookup, the cppreference.com wiki is a great source.

The ”complete” part of the statement refers to the width of coverage. The book covers all algorithms and relevant theory up to the C++20 standard (the C++23 standard is not finalized at the time of writing). All information is present only in sufficient depth required by the context. This depth limitation keeps the book’s overall size reasonable and within the ”guide” style.