Wu Yinghui, Freddie wrote:

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Hi all,

I'm just starting to try out Boost.Date_time library. As a newbie, I want to know if there is any good tutorial or "get started" guide somewhere that I can refer to.

I've checked out the Data_time library documentation, as well as done some search on Google. Yet I cannot find useful information for an absolute beginner.

Simple operation such as "Get the current time in the current time zone,

http://www.boost.org/doc/html/date_time/posix_time.html#ptime_from_clock

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and print it out using ISO format" is not achievable from reading the documentation--

http://www.boost.org/doc/html/date_time/posix_time.html#ptime_to_string

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It is helpful to an experienced user, but not at all to a newbie.

So any hints on how I should get started with Boost.Date_time library?

Read the docs and examples a little deeper.

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Cheers,

Freddie

P.S. I found one very annoying fact that most examples in Boost documentation do not indicate the namespace and/or header file to use for all those classes and types. This makes it very difficult for a beginner to get started in general. Any comments on this?

All of the following examples clearly show the header and namespace:

http://www.boost.org/doc/html/date_time/examples/general_usage_examples.html

http://www.boost.org/doc/html/date_time/examples.html

Overall I've never had a problem with this in Boost docs.

Jeff

Thanks for the pointers Jeff. You can pinpoint where the docs is for that specific task, because you had experience with the library (BTW, that task is just "for example," and I have a lot more doubts regarding the usage of the library). Thanks for the efforts on the library as well as the documentation. I guess it's time for me to refresh our local document cache with the ones on boost.org. :p I think the docs now look a lot more approachable. Sorry for the noise. Regarding the namespace/header file problem, it is not fair to say that all docs had me confused on it. But I did face problems previously when I was going through the references for certain functions I needed. Sometimes, I simply cannot find out the exact namespace/header to use without grepping the source tree (or go back to read the docs in full). Cheers, Freddie