This may be a bit off-topic, but here is my question in a nutshell: Can anyone suggest a good textbook or reference guide for learning C++ for a person in my situation?
My situation is this: I started programming as well as music when I was a young child, way back on a Commodore 64 computer, then later a Commodore 128, first with BASIC and then other languages on those machines. Later in life I became a professional computer technician, but didn't really do any programming for a number of years - Now I'm interested again, and I completed several college courses in HTML, CSS, and Java (Web based). Needless to say, a lot has changed in programming over time, especially with object-oriented stuff, which wasn't around when I was young. I actually found that the web-based languages came rather easily to me (I was the first one in the class to finish the final exam in the HTML class, aced the exam as well!) but I don't know much about C++.
I've successfully set up MS Visual Studio Express 2008 on one of my computers, and got it to work with the Platform SDK and DirectX SDK. ("got it to work" meaning it starts up and finds the libraries OK, not much else.) I've also started fooling around with the Irrlicht open-source engine and a few simple models from Blender, and got the first two tutorials from the Irrlicht website to compile and work properly (the "Hello World" and map test ones).
I've also played around with and modified the two tutorials a bit, but quite honestly if you were to show me a block of C++ code I wouldn't be able to understand much about it or know what it does.
I'd like to learn some of these coding languages, but to be honest (don't laugh) I'm not even sure about the difference between C and C++, and don't really know my way around the Visual Studio program too well, although through trial and error I did figure out a few things.
Given all that, can anyone please nudge me in the right direction, given what I do and don't know?