Effective STL

http://book.douban.com/subject/1456960/

(items on) STL efficiency

Item 1: Choose your containers with care

Item 2: Beware the illusion of container-independent code

Item 3: make copying cheap and correct for objects in containers

Item 4: Call empty() instead of checking size() against zero

Item 5: use range member functions: construction, insertion, erasure, assignment

Item 6: be alert for C++ 's most vexing parse

ifstream dataFile("ints.dat");

istream_iterator<int> dataBegin(dataFile);
istream_iterator<int> dataEnd;

list<int> data(dataBegin, dataEnd); // list<int> data(istream_iterator<int>(dataFile), istream_iterator<int>()); does not work

Item 7: when using containers of "new"ed pointers, remember to "delete" the pointers before the container is destroyed.

(destructor for a pointer doesn't call delete)

or use function objects, where templatization added to the operator ()

struct DeleteObject {
    template<typename T> // templatization added here
    void operator()(const T* ptr) const {
        delete ptr;
    }
};

and use it as follows

void doSomething() {
    deque<SpecialString*> dssp;
    ...
    for_each(dssp.begin(), dssp.end(), DeleteObject());
}

This piece of  code is type-safe, but not exception-safe ==> "smart pointers", e.g., Boost's shared_ptr

Item 8: never create containers of auto_ptrs

(no portability, compilers may fail to compile)

Item 9: choose carefully among erasing options