I learned C++ by accident: A friend of my moms had an old programming book laying around and gave it to me. Next thing i know, i'm "wasting" my vacation reading

I learned C++ by accident: A friend of my moms had an old programming book laying around and gave it to me. Next thing i know, i'm "wasting" my vacation reading the book from cover to cover. I never actually used C++ though. Not once in my admittedly very short time as a hobby and/or employed web dev have i ever actually needed to know C++ or even memory management. So i don't think it's as important to know as you claim it to be. I'm still very glad i learned C++, though. I think it best equates to learning latin in school: You're probably never going to need it, but it gives you great insight into how languages work on a lower level and where they come from. While this won't help with your vocabulary necessarily, it will help with autodidactic learning. For example, if i didn't know about pointers, it's likely i would never have wondered about how the parameters get passed to a function: By reference or by value.