Personally, I avoid recommending books which are entitled "Teach Yourself X in Y Days", as it is simply impossible to teach most programming languages in alleged timeframe. Learning good C++ Basics takes at least some years for most persons, learning the more advanced stuff takes some more years, and becoming a wizard will take at least 10 years.

Generally, I would not buy books with such grandstanding/alleging/"hip"/"cool" titles. Invest some more money in real C++ books, especially look out for the craft of Josuttis, Vandevoorde, Knuth (which is about CS in general). Googling for those names will bring up more names. This is only my hint: Buy something proper, not something cheap with a promise in its title that can't be hold.

Also, read this: Teach yourself programming in 10 years, Peter Norvig.

Quote:Peter Norvig

Let's analyze what a title like Learn Pascal in Three Days could mean:

• Learn: In 3 days you won't have time to write several significant programs, and learn from your successes and failures with them. You won't have time to work with an experienced programmer and understand what it is like to live in that environment. In short, you won't have time to learn much. So they can only be talking about a superficial familiarity, not a deep understanding. As Alexander Pope said, a little learning is a dangerous thing.



• Pascal: In 3 days you might be able to learn the syntax of Pascal (if you already knew a similar language), but you couldn't learn much about how to use the syntax. In short, if you were, say, a Basic programmer, you could learn to write programs in the style of Basic using Pascal syntax, but you couldn't learn what Pascal is actually good (and bad) for. So what's the point? Alan Perlis once said: "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing". One possible point is that you have to learn a tiny bit of Pascal (or more likely, something like Visual Basic or &#106avascript) because you need to interface with an existing tool to accomplish a specific task. But then you're not learning how to program; you're learning to accomplish that task.



• in Three Days: Unfortunately, this is not enough, as the next section
shows.

What about "Thinking in C++ 2nd edition" by Bruce Eckel? It actually assumes you to have little knowledge of C, but can you comment it ? It used to be an excellent book few years ago, but is it outdated now?

Beginning C++ game programming is a game book, which assumes you are a total beginner. It is a very good one.