Sorry to butt in here, but I'd recommend the book "The C++ Standard Template Library: A Tutorial and Reference" by Josuttis for exactly that purpose. There are several chapters you can skim and get a good sense pretty quickly as to what's in the STL, without being bored to tears. It also has lots of good examples and discussions and things like that. I've looked into a couple books in the past, trying to do exactly what you're talking about, and that one towers over the rest, IMHO. Excellent stuff.
