This book centers around the author's Loki library. Along the way he develops many and various utility template classes. This book does provide an introduction to template programming, but at a rather steep learning curve. For those first learning about templates, they may read Nicolai Josuttis' "The C++ Standard Library, A Tutorial and Reference", and after that read David Vandevoorde's "C++ Templates, The Complete Guide". One of my favorite chapters from the book is the one describing how to implement your own "small object" memory allocation library. I enjoyed it.