The documentation is oriented to both newbies and experienced library users. However, users are expected to be familiar with the commonly used Boost components, such as shared_ptr, make_shared (see Boost.SmartPtr), and function (Boost.Function). Some parts of the documentation will refer to other Boost libraries, as needed.

If this is your first experience with the library, it is recommended to read the Design overview section first in order to have the first glance on the library capabilities and architecture. The Installation and Tutorial sections will help to get started experimenting with the library. The tutorial gives the overview of the library features with sample code snippets. Some tutorial steps are presented in two forms: simple and advanced. The simple form typically describes the most common and easy way to do the task and it is being recommended to be read by newbies. The advanced form usually gives an expanded way to do the same thing but with ability to do some extra customization and in-depth explanation. This form may come handy for more experienced users and should generally be read if your needs are not satisfied with the easy way.

Besides the tutorial there is an Detailed features description chapter. This part gives description of other tools provided by the library that were not covered by the tutorial. This chapter is better to be read on per-case basis.

Last, but not least, there is a reference which gives the formal description of library components.

For simplicity in the code snippets in this documentation it shall be assumed that the following namespace aliases were defined:

namespace logging = boost::log;
namespace sinks = boost::log::sinks;
namespace src = boost::log::sources;
namespace fmt = boost::log::formatters;
namespace flt = boost::log::filters;
namespace attrs = boost::log::attributes;
namespace keywords = boost::log::keywords;

Aside from these namespaces the library also provides boost::log::experimental namespace. Tools defined in this namespace, as the naming implies, are not stable and thus are not advertized for productional usage. However, adventurous developers are encouraged to explore fresh features that appear in that namespace. Due to lack of their stability, these instruments are not covered by this documentation.