Intro to STL (cont.) 
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There are three main components of the STL that we will discuss throughout the semester:

containers
itertators
algorithms

Containers hold the data we are interested in, and have slightly different flavors

Iterators are basically pointers to data held in containers.  They are powerful in that
they facilitate looping and advanced, generic algorithms on containers.  This
can (and often) reduces a lot of lines of code into a statement or two using these
pointer-like properties.

The algorithms available via the STL are common ones you may think of like
random_shuffle to shuffle a collection of items or sort to sort them.  To enable 
these algorithms to work on all STL containers, they use iterators to process 
data instead of the class internals.  There are about 70 algorithms available.

Containers
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There are three types of containers:  sequence containers, associative containers
and container adaptors.  Iterators are only available for sequence containers and
associative containers.

Sequence containers are similar to arrays in that they are often indexed linearly

Associative containers are indexed by key/value pairs, and therefore are
non-linear

Container adaptors implement basic data structures using a sequence container
at its core