Quite a few changes have occurred between the second and third editions of C++ Primer. Most notably, C++ has undergone international standardization, which has not only added new features to the language, such as exception handling, run-time type identification, namespaces, a built-in Boolean data type, and a new cast notation, but has also extensively modified and extended existing features, such as templates, the class mechanism in support of both object-oriented and object-based programming,
nested types, and overload function resolution. Perhaps of even more significance, an extensive library is now part of Standard C++, including what was previously referred to as the Standard Template Library, or STL. A new string type, a set of sequence and associative container types — such as vector, list, map, and set — and an extensible collection of generic algorithms to operate on those types are all features of this new standard library. There's not only quite a lot of new material to cover but also new