Chapter 2. The First Brush with Boost's Utilities

Over the course of this book, we will focus on a number of Boost libraries that deal with different subsystems, such as filesystems, threads, network I/O, and a variety of containers, among others. In each chapter, we will delve into the details of a few such libraries. This chapter is different, in the sense that we will pick up a set of useful and varied tricks that will help you in almost all programming situations. To that end we have the following topics lined up for us:

• Simple data structures

• Working with heterogeneous values

• Handling command-line arguments

• Other utilities and compile-time checks

This is the kitchen-sink chapter that you can keep coming back to and scour for an interesting technique that would seem to apply to a problem at hand.