Boost

Boost is a powerful set of libraries and header files that give you a lot of really useful functionality for C++.

http://www.boost.org/

Starting With Boost

Their "Getting Started" guide is a big help for figuring out how to use Boost libraries: http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_44_0/more/getting_started/index.html

Basically, Boost provides you with functionality provided primarily through header files. This makes the build process trivial (no compiling - just put the header files somewhere), and it makes the compiling process almost as easy (add a

#include <boost/lambda/lambda.hpp>

to your code, and then add

-I/path/to/boost

to your compile line).

Alternatively, a list of Boost functionality that requires libraries and compilation (a small subset of Boost) is here: http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_44_0/more/getting_started/unix-variants.html#header-only-libraries