Austern's book introduces you to the generic programming paradigm and to the most important instance of that paradigm--the C++ Standard Template Library (STL). This book reveals that the STL is more than a set of convenient container classes: It is also an extensible framework for generic and interoperable components. Austern explains the central ideas underlying generic programming--concepts, modeling, and refinement--and shows how these ideas lead to the fundamental concepts of the STL: iterators, containers, and function objects.