Synopsis:
The STL is a set of template classes that provide a lot of support for building C++ programs. You don't have to know much about templates to understand this material. If there is time we will discuss templates at the end of the course.
The largest part of the STL is a set of containers - vector, list, map, ... - and a set of algorithms that can be used with the containers. The two are connected by interators, essentially smart pointers.