Welcome! Today, we're diving into C++ maps. These store items as key-value pairs, much like a dictionary where you look up a word (key) to find its meaning (value). By the end of this lesson, you’ll have a good grasp of maps in C++.

Maps in C++ are collections of key-value pairs. This method differentiates them from arrays and vectors, which store elements in a linear order. std::map stores elements in a sorted order by key.

Here's a simple map, where names are keys and ages are values:

In map_example, the keys are "Alice," "Bob," and "Charlie," and the values are 25, 28, and 30, respectively. Key uniqueness is integral to the design of maps — for example, that means we can only have a single key called "Alice".

Maps are initiated by placing key-value pairs within {} using the initialization list.