James Hughes wrote:

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Slightly off topic, but what I would find a great help with regards to learning Boost is a better description on what each library can do, and more importantly, what problems it solves.

For example, perhaps someone has a problem they need to solve that a Boost lib will help with, but just reading through the top level of the documentation may not give them enough of a hint that this is the case.

This issue has recently been the subject of discussion on the developer list. I can't remember exactly what the outcome was, though. If you have any concrete suggestions on how to make the library overview without making it unreadable long, we'd love to hear them.

Even a simple list of common problems solved (or if inapplicable, the area of computer theory covered by the component) at the top level of the docs would help I think. Some (most) of the short descriptions are already pretty good (I think that now, but when I first looked they were rather bewildering), but for the more complicated libs, maybe more information would be useful. For example, Property map is described thus "Concepts defining interfaces which map key objects to value objects". At first glance this seems to be pretty similar to stl::map (to someone new perhaps to both Boost and STL), so perhaps needs little more explanation at the top level as to what it's for.

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My pet one is simple loading and saving of configuration information in XML. Which library should/can I use for that? Serialisation? Or is there a better option? Or is there a boost lib in the wings perhaps aimed at that particular task?

The property_tree library currently under review can do exactly that. The Serialization library can load and save XML, but only in its own particular format, i.e. you cannot make it load a schema you have externally defined.

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Another is Boost::graph - I see lots of questions about it on the list, but what real world problems does it solve?

That's what studying computer science is about: learning how to solve problems. Having learned graph theory, the simple statement that Boost.Graph helps with graph problems is worth a lot to me. There is no way to explain in a short statement what kinds of problems the library solves. Many kinds problems can be mapped to graphs.

Already did that - although it was twenty years ago! Problem with Computer Science degrees I always thought (and that's what I did), was the lack of real world application. A lot of theory, and *some* good stuff on application, but not enough. Graph theory is a good example - I understand the concepts (even from twenty years ago), but have never been given enough examples of real world application to be able to apply it myself (perhaps I have never had a need of course!). James

Sebastian Redl _______________________________________________ Boost-users mailing list Boost-users@lists.boost.org http://lists.boost.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/boost-users