The standard library containers

The C++ standard library offers a set of very useful container types. A container is a data structure that contains a collection of elements. The container manages the memory of the elements it holds. This means that we don't have to explicitly create and delete the objects that we put in a container. We can pass objects created on the stack to a container and the container will copy and store them on the free store.

Iterators are used to access elements in containers, and are, therefore, a fundamental concept for understanding algorithms and data structures from the standard library. The iterator concept is covered in Chapter 5, Algorithms. For this chapter, it's enough to know that an iterator can be thought of as a pointer to an element and that iterators have different operators defined depending on the container they belong to. For example, array-like data structures provide random access iterators to their elements. These iterators...