C++ - &quot;A tour of C++&quot;<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Tour-C--Depth&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0321958314" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Tour-C--Depth&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0321958314</a><p>I read this book after having programmed C++ with the common &quot;C++ is C with classes&quot; attitude for a while, and it really made me change the way I looked at this language.<p>It was the book that made me realize how beautiful the RAII idiom is, that the STL was clearly not hacked together by a bunch of crazy monkeys, that you rarely need raw pointers in your code and that -- in contrast to popular belief -- you seldom need to care about memory management.<p>When I finished that book, and though in the full knowledge that I was dealing with this ugly monster of the Frankenstein kind; just like at the end of &quot;the beauty and the beast&quot;, I had somehow come to respect and appreciate that language.