I love books that go straight to the point. I appreciate terseness, and appreciate it orders of magnitude more when it comes with no loss in clarity. Its amazing what some authors can pull off with so few words.

You can guess K&R is one of my favorites.

I understand that C++ is a huge complicated language, Scott Meyers puts it very aptly by stating its a federation of languages, and this makes hard to write pithy pedagogic books. In spite of that, the ever too common 800+ page tomes have always worked against me.

Stroustrup's 3rd is probably a mighty fine book to learn from, its just not for me and its definitely no K&R.

I think my favorite is a little known book by Dirk Vermier http://books.google.com/books/about/Multi_Paradigm_Programmi... It should definitely not be one's first programming book, perhaps not even one's first C++ book. A shade shy of 300 pages, it did serve me well with its terseness, correctness and clarity. The only thing is that its too pricey for its size, its a bit dated now because it covers c++98.

I think C++ is best understood from one pithy book that shows you the just the language to get started, and then a series of Scott Meyers, Andrei Alexandrescu, Herb Sutter style books to get good at it.