I mostly used Cplusplus.com to learn C++ but I could already program at the time and was only interested in learning the syntax. Good thing about that site is it shows the way C++11 does things as well. I would start learning the basics of C++11 as well because "auto" (C# "var") and ranged for will make most of the crazy STL iterator stuff go away for you and it will seem more like C# or Java.

I'm surprised nobody mentioned The Famous C++ FAQ - http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq/

Over the years, I fond it to be an invaluable resource to refresh the knowledge (before an Interview) and connect all dots - with only a few lines/paragraphs of text (instead of 10 pages in some book).

Once you can answer all those questions, it will mean that you understand the design and implementation of the language, and you will be a master of C++ - of course, for that level of knowledge, you will need to go through many books - Design Patterns, STL, Template Metaprogramming, ...

I'm not sure I'd recommend Bruce Eckel's Thinking in C++ at this early stage, though. It's a pretty heavy read that is best to enjoy once you have a basic grasp on the most basic low-level C++ concepts like pointers, virtual methods and templates (and no, Java exp. doesn't really count here).

And that's before we even touch the subject of C++11....

As I mentioned before there are a few things in C++11 that make the langauge easier to use for people who are coming from higher abstraction layers, sadly not all the features are implemented in all compilers yet. GCC is currently mostly there and so is Clang I think. But the ranged for(foreach) and auto keywords are definitely something C# and Java programmer will understand and be able to harness.

Well, we've had the basic for_each for about a decade (perhaps slightly less) in C++, available from <algorithm>

That's probably an area I'd recommend anyone [coming from a managed language] to start.

I'm still not convinced C++11 makes things much easier for people coming from managed languages. Half of those concepts must seem pretty alien...

I still think one has to learn C++ bottom up - you do need to tear a bunch of hair here and there to truly appreciate things like Smart Pointers, STL data structures (over regular arrays), STL algorithms, ....

It's usually only then that the design choices of the language designers click

Most of the stuff in algorithm sadly require you to know about functors and function pointers to make them work effectively, using a lambda on those is actually a lot nicer then either of the previous one (see http://nwcpp.org/static/talks/2011/lambda.pdf).

But we are getting off topic here, the only way as mentioned before to really learn C++ is by shooting yourself in the foot repeatedly and learning from those mistakes, and C++ makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. So as a beginner I would stay away from anything that is intermediate level at the beginning and write code that just runs on the stack to begin with as you would in Java and C#. The heap is not hard to manage but object life time will come in to play when using the heap lots, as you need to manage the allocation on the heap as well as the deallocation of your objects in it.

The good thing about C++ [from the learning standpoint] is that it is incredibly unforgiving [especially compared to a managed runtime like C# / Java] and makes it very easy to mess things up.

Which is a good thing, since the long-term memory and coding reflexes are best initialized by spending hours in a debugger / stackoverflow / msdn and not by a single short exercise that works the first time you try it out.

As a kid, did you listen to your parents to not touch the Hot Iron on the Ironing board or did you rather learn by burning your hand ?

I recommend Bruce Eckel's free-to-download "Thinking in C++" books. Great content, good explanations - deep enough to clarify but not enough to lose focus - and good exercises. Sure, a bit old, but all code works (I ran most examples and solved most exercises with gcc and clang) and it won't stop you from learning C++11 after you've mastered the basics - actually, it will provide you with a solid base for C++11. Read Vol. 1 and do all exercises. Worth every second you spend on it.

I think C++ is a great language. You can do so many neat memory management tricks with C++ than with Java or .NET. It is also a true work horse if you get your code right. For me, understanding how memory layout and memory management works in C++, helped a lot learning C++ language. I think it is also quite cool that when you work with C++ you'll get to know how memory management works in OS and you surely get know difference between stack and heap memory and what are pros and cons per each.

When you learn all these, moving then to some more higher level language is quite easy. It is good to know, that even if you are using Java or .NET same C/C++ things happens under the hood. I think it is kind of language what gives to you quite a lot of. It takes time to learn, but I think it's totally worth of.

Altough I hate header file comments when working with std-library. It's so cryptic, I'll have to say that. Fortunately in cplusplus.com std-library is documented quite well.

This is not perhaps best example, but I found it really cool that how easy it is to corrupt stack with C standard methods and run method from the stack with buffer overflow attack. That kind of things just open your eyes. It was a practice what we did in school.