GenericProgrammingAndTheStl Using and Extending the C++ StandardTemplateLibrary by Matthew H. Austern: ". Addison-Wesley, 1999,
The STL is a large and extensible body of efficient, generic, and interoperable software components. It includes many of the basic algorithms and data structures of computer science, and it is written so that algorithms and data structures are decoupled from each other. Rather than a container class library, it is more accurate to think of the STL as a library of generic algorithms; containers exist so that the algorithms have something to operate on. -- Amazon Review