Re: [Boost-users] Boost book

I would like to see Not too complex or complete 'use cases' with ASIO Regular expressions Spirit file io, threads documentation and logging frameworks serialization It would be good if each one of those examples, actually 'repeat' the use of some fundamental stuff -- so that reader of the book can get the taste of how shared pointers, functors, lambda functions, etc get to be applied in all of those examples. I had difficulties understanding how serialization works on std::set of shared pointers, for example, I would have not been able to use ASIO without the help of PION library (threaded http server built on top of asio) Examples of how to use thread local data storage were not intuitive to me either, typically thread local data storage is used to bind something like a File or DB connection to a thread -- and an example of such concept would be nice. Spirit is extremely useful thing to have, but of course has some learning curve, it has some good examples. However introducing the users to it 'lightly' in the context of the book would be nice. Things that are really 'unnatural' to do with regular expressions like 'balanced' parenthesis matching/etc are a lot more natural with Spirit. It would help users to understand the difference between a regular expressions and a full blown parser. There are several constant questions on the list about what I consider horrible omission of C++ standard UTF-8/16, Database access, JSON,XML parsing, RMI (remote method invocation) (surprisingly almost all of these things require to have 'Reflection' functionality in the core language). I know those things are not covered by Boost, but perhaps mentioning them and recommending a comparative overview of what's out there -- would be nice. Because Boost is not considered just as 'yet-another library' -- instead it is for us, the poor C++ programmers, that are bombarded with 'why not Java or C#' -- an escape, a show-case and a standard what C++ could be -- if would not be managed by ISO standardization committee all these years. On Fri, 14 Aug 2009 23:33 -0400, "Scott Gifford" wrote:

Björn Karlsson writes:

[...]

...

I would love to know what everyone here wants from a new (general) Boost book. (Feel free to contact me off list with your thoughts.)

I can usually find detailed API docs online OK, and often code samples. What can be hard is getting a high-level overview of what's available, learning scenarios that the different classes were designed for, and finding the details that would let you decide which to use.

For example, I can easily find the methods for shared_ptr, but what are the circumstances where I might want to use that? And when do I use auto_ptr vs. shared_ptr? Things that I know now after using both for awhile, but didn't know when I first started out.

Basically, what would be useful to me would be the advice of an experienced C++/Boost programmer on how to get the most out of boost.

As far as individual libraries, thorough documentation on asio would be very useful.

Hope this feedback is helpful!

-----Scott. _______________________________________________ Boost-users mailing list Boost-users@lists.boost.org http://lists.boost.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/boost-users -- Vlad P author of C++ ORM http://github.com/vladp/CppOrm/tree/master

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