"The Standard Template Library (STL) is a C++ programming library that has been developed by Alexander Stepanov and Meng Lee at the Hewlett Packard laboratories in Palo Alto, California. It was designed to enable a C++ programmer to do generic programming and is based on the extensive use of templates - also called parametrized types. This paper tries to give a comprehensive and complete survey on the STL programming paradigm and shall serve as step-by-step tutorial for the STL newcomer, who has fundamental knowledge in C++ and the object-oriented paradigm."