Hi all, I have worked on C++ for a long time in the past, but then I stopped using C++ and moved to other languages like Java sheerly because I was facing portability and repeatability issues with my programs. However, with the advent of Boost, I am very excited to go back to C++ again. Boost looks like a pretty big package to easily go through and seems daunting at first to get used to using it. I have been trying to read the documentation and packages available, but it is proving to be a bit difficult to get started quickly. I work mainly in Machine Learning & Data Mining and this job mainly requires me to write very efficient and fast code for numerical processing programs as well as do a lot of data, especially text preprocessing. It would be great if you cant point to me some good packages in Boost for the following tasks. Packages that are very good and don't have a very steep learning curve. - Text Parsing. package that lets me do something like what Sed and Awk can do. - Linear Algebra - Eigen analysis, matrix operations, Matrix decomposition etc. - Optimization routines - Linear programming , Quadratic Programming etc. - HTML, XML parsing etc. Please do let me know if I am posting in the wrong forum. Thanks & Regards, Ajay Gopalakrishnan.