Rush Manbert
I haven't had time to read all the responses to this, so I apologize if I have duplicated someone else's reply.
It would be good to know what the experienced users consider to be the "everyday" or "basic" parts of Boost. The safe casts come to mind. I guess what I'm thinking of is something along the lines of "even if you use nothing else from this library collection, the following minimum set will help you write safer C++ code."
_Great_ idea!
I suspect that many of us first start using Boost because we're trying to solve some specific problem. (I was looking for a platform-neutral filesystem library.) We find the library we need and we use it. Then we have another problem to solve, so we find the library that helps there. Then one day we have the time to read through all of the library descriptions and we find things that we want to use, and we realize that we should go through all of the code we have written since we started using Boost, and replace error prone things with better Boost things. But by then we don't have time/our code has worked reliably for quite a while/something else stops us, and we can't really do that. It would have been nice to have read about those useful, basic things in the beginning.
I do plan an overview of the scope of Boost in the talk. Not that I can describe everything, but I can give some sense of what areas are covered.
Other than that, the only thing you might add are testimonials on the home page.
You're suggesting that I put the testimonials in my talk, or just that we add more testimonials to the home page?
Everything I have used (and it's a whole lot more than the filesystem library by now) just works. My experience with other open source code has not been so seamless and easy, so I really appreciate this about Boost, and I thank all those who have contributed to it.
Can we use that one? :) -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting www.boost-consulting.com