> Should I master C first (pointers and such?) That only means that you have to unlearn a lot of bad habits. For example malloc/free should not be used in c++

> Should I master C first (pointers and such?) That only means that you have to unlearn a lot of bad habits. For example malloc/free should not be used in c++ code unless you call into a c library that uses the counterpart. Even the c++ equivalent new/delete pairs should only be used if it cannot be avoided. > and then get into C++ with its Turing complete templating language and such in order to be able to be competent enough to grok all kinds of code written in C++? I am quite sure I used Java collections before I had a grasp on its generics. You don't have to be able to implement std::vector<int> to understand that it is a collection of int. You might have to be told to avoid std::vector<bool>, but that is more because it is an unholy design failure that should have gone the way of the trigraph a long time ago .