Instruct: Classify the given Amazon review as either positive or negative.
Query: Not nearly as good as I was led to expect

In my view, this book tries to be both tutorial and reference but fails at both. I can find better, more complete, and more accessible reference material in 10 seconds with google. Whenever I open this book to find information about some aspect of the STL, I end up googling for the same information a few minutes later.The examples are near useless. They are all minimal examples of basic functionality and offer no help in using the library for real-life tasks. They do show you which header files to include, which is a plus.Hash maps are completely left out of the book. While not officially part of the stl, they are still a significant part of it, and one that requires more explaining than the rest.I am to understand the +5 reviews were because there are no better books on this subject, similarily my +2 review is because there are not enough negative reviews of this book.