Re: [Boost-users] Boost user's guide or getting started guide?

Hi John, On 25-2-2013 16:23, Mateusz Loskot wrote:

On 25 February 2013 14:42, John Lilley wrote:

...

Greetings!

I feel that many questions I have about Boost.Geometry are really questions about the “Boost way and true path”. Is there a good place to get started with Boost.Geometry specifically or Boost in general? I feel that I am locking in some basic understanding of how all of these templates fit together, what are Ranges, what are “concepts” etc. Where do I RTFM? Boost is a collection of libraries and there is no true path, so it's hard to answer your question. (What is the true path for discovering GNU C toolset?)

Read through the Getting Started http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_53_0/more/getting_started/index.html and then look at the one-liner for each of the libraries and identify those you are interested in or actually need: http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/ Follow with reading overview, motivation and tutorial sections of chosen ones. Reflect if you still want to use them. Then dig the docs deeper, work with examples in libs/<library>/ folders.

There are also external resources you may find useful, books:

"Beyond the C++ Standard Library: An Introduction to Boost" by Björn Karlsson. "The Boost C++ Libraries" by Boris Schäling Obviously, you will want to have C++ standard and C++ template books handy while reading docs of more advanced general purpose libraries.

If you have a library-specific question, ask here. Don't forget to place [library name] tag at the beginning of subject line. For example:

[geometry] What is foo in bar?

In addition to Boris Schäling's book, you might also look into his tutorials, which can be found here: http://en.highscore.de/cpp/boost/ Boost.Geometry is not (yet) there, but a general introduction and many often-used libraries are described with lots of examples. Regards, Barend