Introduction

In the last chapter, we discussed how to analyze time and memory complexity and how to measure performance. In this chapter, we are going to talk about how to choose and use data structures from the standard library. To understand why certain data structures work very well on the computers of today, we first need to cover some basics about computer memory.

In this chapter, you will learn about:

• The properties of computer memory
• The standard library containers: sequence containers and associative containers
• The standard library container adaptors
• Parallel arrays