This book is both rather noddy and out of date (I have the first edition). I bought it from a second-hand bookshop, and in the end it's been a good way for getting up to speed with C++'s STL, which in many ways just appears to be a way of bolting on functional-style features (lots of higher-order functions etc.) to a C-style language, but that's another rant.
I'd previously bought Austern's Generic Programming and the STL, but I found that too dry and technical to be of real use - it's much more a book on the mechanics of the STL and how to implement extensions, which really isn't much use when it comes to using the thing. In that respect, Ammeraal's book is way better, although it leaves you with the nagging feeling that deeper parts of the STL (such as complexity constraints, common implementation techniques, how to extend it) have been glossed over. Still, there you go. Between these books and Bjarne's book, I've probably got reasonable documentation of the thing.
Posted 2004-07-29.