Covers Boost 1.53 (Note: 2nd edition published 2017.)

I’ve read a few books in the same mould as this, ‘Boost recipe books’. They all share the same fundamental problem – why would someone buy the book when there is a similar amount of information available in the online Boost documentation. Boost includes well over 100 libraries, so consequently either thousands of pages are required, or else the coverage is either scant or incomplete.

Having said that, I quite liked the layout and the problem-oriented approach. In 327 pages, there just isn’t enough information. Say I want to use Boost to generate some random numbers, there’s a recipe for using Boost.Random . If I wanted to use a system generated uniformly distributed integer, then my luck is in. Otherwise I have to follow the link to the online Boost documentation.

In summary, it doesn’t add much value compared to the online docs.