Jeff Garland wrote:
I've taken a shot at a different categorization once upon a time:
http://www.crystalclearsoftware.com/cgi-bin/boost_wiki/wiki.pl?OOPSLA2004/Li...
That said, I'm not sure I ever heard an answer why Beth considers the current categories insufficient:
They're not insufficient for their purpose, but they are insufficient for what I'm trying to do here: to introduce people to the Boost Libraries. If, as someone completely new to Boost, I browse the categories, I might find something of immediate interest (String and text processing, say, or Template Metaprogramming), but there's a good chance I won't. I'll still have no idea that there are Boost Libraries that can simplify coding, prevent common bugs, etc. I won't know that Boost has lots of great utilities or full-featured libraries like date-time, serialization, etc. (Again, this isn't a criticism of the categories. They're meant to sort the libraries into logical categories, not introduce them to new users.) Your list gives a better overview of the range of subjects the libraries deal with, and would probably interest a lot more casual visitors, but it's still not quite what I'm aiming for here. People who visit the website have a wide range of needs, interests, experience, and time to invest in learning a new library, and I'd like to send each to a list of libraries that would be most applicable to them. This may be an impossible goal -- my first attempt hasn't been very successful -- and maybe a more functional categorization like you've proposed is the way to go. Some of your categories definitely whet my interest -- I can't wait to check out that GUI library ;-) -- but when I think of some of the libraries I've used the most (smart_ptr, date-time, operators, multi_arrays, filesystem), I don't see much there that might point me in their direction or give me a clue that they exist. Of course no list can do that for all the libraries and still be short enough for easy browsing, but perhaps we can get a little closer yet.