There's a somewhat recent reddit thread, fyi. http://bit.ly/bTMjtd http://bit.ly/bTMjtd I've found the best practices for C++ are usually to practice avoiding

There's a somewhat recent reddit thread, fyi. http://bit.ly/bTMjtd http://bit.ly/bTMjtd I've found the best practices for C++ are usually to practice avoiding best practices whenever possible. That is if you're in it for the olde 10-year Norvig cycle. Time allowing, bottom-up programming (as the equally venerable On Lisp details) also applies to design patterns, template meta-programming and all that. It's good to read about them, to learn what others have experimented with and found to be useful (or so they think). But you're only really going to learn them in the context of something useful and practical. It's much better to discover them for yourself in practice. That said, there's a lot of C++ syntax and STL idioms that are not obvious at all -- which make Meyers' books very important (particularly the first one) even for starting out. Also, C++ as doctrine is not fun -- i.e., a way of 'thinking' about programming. But C++ as a collection of language-changing extensions to C is not so terrible. I guess that's true for anything. Actually, now that I think about it. There's Lisp and C -- elegant, simple languages on top of assembly and the lambda calculus if you wish or FP if that's what you emphasize (i.e., math). These are in fairly close approximation to code (assembly) that is in fairly close approximation to how hardware or math works. These provide structure on top of that. And the rest, whether OO in Java and C++ and its rough attempt to merge type theory with performance-consciousness of the actor model from Simula and Smalltalk and Objective-C and all that -- the rest are just organizing paradigms on top. It's late. I've been coding all night. I forget what the question is. There's like 10 dimensions in play when you learn a new language. But like anything, if you're in it for the long term, whatever you learn, learn it really well. There's a lot of similarities at all levels. tl;dr Read SICP.