C++ - "A tour of C++"

http://www.amazon.com/Tour-C--Depth/dp/0321958314

I read this book after having programmed C++ with the common "C++ is C with classes" attitude for a while, and it really made me change the way I looked at this language.

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.

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 "the beauty and the beast", I had somehow come to respect and appreciate that language.