One nit-picky correction ... Bjarne Stroustroup DID NOT have anything at all to do with the creation of the STL ... not even a hint, or an idea, or any implementation. I cannot remeber the name of the guy who did, but I believe either his first or last name starts with N. (not much help eh...), sorry.
As for why they are not commented, well that''s because they are written by P.J.Plauger who runs Dinkumware Ltd... and is trying to make a living as a Library writer... Some other version availible from H.P. and S.G.I. as well as the GNU versions are all more well documented ... and MOST IMPORTANT, they use meaningfull names. PJP realizes that if his code is meaningless to people who do not already known how it works, he will minimize competition in the future. Don''t get me wrong, I like PJP, and find his C++ User''s Journal articles to be extremely informative, but I''m just pointing out that the Library is hard to follow for BUSINESS reasons, not because it has to be so archaicly laid out and named.
As for learning. I found Herbert Schildt''s book "C++: The Complete Reference" 3rd Edition by Osborne Press, to be a great start. And SiCrane has the order about right EXCEPT that the algorythms are COMPLETELY unneeded by a learning programmer ... i mean, we have all written "find" and "copy" for our own ADTs before. So I think learning iterators then: Vector, Deque, List, THEN algorythms, and then the Map and Set containers, would be easiest AND most usefull, because you''ll find you need to understand a deque inside and out long before you need to partition one
helpfull hint one ... when you are first learning iterators, just think of them as pointers into contiguous block of objects ... as long as you only use the specified operations to move around (usually ++, but for random access you can use arbitrary increments/decrements) then it is just like using a pointer into an array.
helpfull hint two ... the STL consistently uses iterators to specify a RANGE ... and the first iterator always points to the first data member in the range, but the second iterator always points to an iterator one PAST the last element in the range. Example: begin() returns the first element in a container ... so you start iterating AT begin() ... but end() returns an invalid iterator ... so you DO NOT operate on the data pointed to by end(). a loop looks like this:
for(MyDeque::iterator pos = myData.begin; pos != myData.end(); ++pos)
{
// do something ... such as
cout << *pos;
}
NOTE - the for loop stops when pos == end() ... so *pos does NOT get called when pos == end() (which would be an error ... just like if pos was a NULL pointer).
