Hi Robert and Jonathan, In preparing some slides for a course I'm giving, I've been reading through the serialization documentation. Although it's generally well organized and presented, there are a few problems: 1. The menu control doesn't seem to keep the browser's displayed URL in synch with the location being browsed (FireFox on Windows XP). Wasn't that a major coup of Jonathan's menu control? 2. Deserialization of derived classes through base class pointers is an incredibly important subject -- even for many first-time users -- but the instructions for handling it are buried deep in Reference > Serializable Concept > Pointers > Pointers to Objects of Derived Classes (http://www.boost.org/libs/serialization/doc/serialization.html#derivedpointe...) This material _needs_ to be in the tutorial! In fact, the material in the reference section is narrative and tutorial in nature, which seems inappropriate for a reference manual. Maybe you should just move it? 3. In that reference section, '&' is used repeatedly where only '>>' is appropriate. For example: main(){ ... base *b; ar & b; } That can only be confusing. 4. The documentation says that you can write your freestanding serialize() function in namespace boost::serialization, with the strong implication that it will work even on compilers that support ADL. But it won't work unless boost::serialization is an associated namespace of one of the arguments, as demonstrated by the following program: namespace me { class X {}; } namespace boost { namespace serialization { template <class T> int call_serialize(T const& x) { serialize(x); return 0; } void serialize(me::X); }} int y = boost::serialization::call_serialize(me::X()); As far as I can tell, there's no requirement that any of the arguments to serialize have boost::serialization as an associated namespace. 5. Archive Concept Requirements are specified in a completely new, unprecedented way. I can see why you want to write them this way, but the result is that it isn't completely clear which elements of the interface are required and which are optional. For example, there's a colon after the class name. Does the class need to be derived from something? What about the names of function and member template parameters? I know the answer to that one, but a novice might not. What about the default arguments to member functions? Is it okay to write overloads? Also, there's an extra pair of namespace closers in the second archive concept example. 6. In http://www.boost.org/libs/serialization/doc/archive_reference.html#implement... it says: All input archives should be derived from the following template: template<class Archive> detail::common_iarchive; but that's nowhere to be found in the archive concept requirements. Which is it? Also, that "detail::" is actually nested in the boost::archive namespace, which is not at all clear from the text there. It's not clear to me why archives should live in a namespace other than serialization; if they were in boost::serialization *and* users were required to derive from one of the archive types, that would solve problem 4. -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting www.boost-consulting.com