This manual is an introduction to using Tools.h++, Rogue Wave's foundation class library. It assumes that you are familiar with C++. If you are not, you will find several books of interest in the Bibliography.
If you're an advanced C++ user, you may want to accompany this manual with Stroustrup [1991], Lippman [1991], or Ellis and Stroustrup [1990]. The latter is sometimes referred to as "The ARM," the Annotated Reference Manual. The terse but precise style of these works makes them excellent references to the language.
When reading this manual, you'll notice the following special conventions:
courier font --- Used for disk directories, file names, examples, operating system commands, function names, code and code fragments (for example, RWTPtrHashSet<int RWDefHArgs(int)> hset;, deque<T>, isEqual). Most function names start with a lower case letter, but subsequent words are capitalized (for example, compareTo()).
Bold Italic -- Used for classes (for example, RWCollectable or RWCString). Most Rogue Wave classes include a prefix RW. The class name conveys what the class does, and distinguishes a Rogue Wave class from the generically named class of another vendor (for example, RWIterator, not just Iterator.) Class names begin with capital letters.
Italic -- Used for Rogue Wave product names (for example, Tools.h++).
Italic or bold only -- Conventional uses, such as emphasis or special terminology.
Vertical ellipses -- In code examples, they indicate that some part of the code is missing:
main()
{
.
. //Something happens
.
}