I got started almost two decades back, and the very languages have changed since then. There were a couple good books that I read on C/C++, but this was pre-ANSI C++. There was no STL, yet, and some other, lesser known, features hadn't yet been added to the language. This was also back in the days of DOS with the memory models. That could be a total misery, as you had to worry about whether data objects were larger than 64KB. If they were, lots of language features wouldn't work at all, and you had to write your own replacement functions to deal with them. Array addressing was a major chore for the HUGE memory model (as opposed to LARGE, SMALL, COMPACT, and TINY). All that has gone away.

Therefore, I have no real recommendations for current books. I still have some of the C++ books that I thought were useful, but I still wouldn't recommend them. Times have changed. There is an ANSI standard for C++ that none of my books addressed. There is now a second version of the ANSI standard for C, and some of the things in the books I have are simply wrong. For example, I believe they had an Int as being 16 bits, whereas they are now 32 bits. The Long of those days was 32 bits, while today a Long is 64. Minor stuff, but there is so MUCH of it.

Books I buy these days are all on specialized topics, such as robotics, WCF, and the like.