I never thought that c++ development could be so much pain. If you come from other languages you are spoiled with a lot of features, but get a punch in your face if you trying to do similar things in c++. As an longtime Actionscripter and java guy, i decided to start some c++ development, because i wanted to do more things with openFrameworks.
The first lesson i learnt is to mess more with the compiler then with c++ as language. I use Visual Studio ,as I’m on Windows and was a little disappointed of some missing features for pure c++ development i used to know from eclipse like refactoring and intellisense. If you develop in c# you have all this features in Visual Studio.
The next big thing are the overwhelming compiler settings i had no clue about. So where do you start from? If you grab some C++ books you always get only information about OPP, what is inheritance and all the other stuff that tells you only some language features. But if you develop your first program , you get stuck with missing libraries, memory pitfalls or weired c-string stuff you don’t understand. (And not to mention the problems with proper linking your program).
I understand people who are afraid of this whole c++ mess.(I always was and be by myself).

After endless google sessions and some c++ books that didn’t covered  the right information i found two useful books:

Windows via c++ : This is a incredible Book about a lot of Windows internals and you get a deep understanding of the operation system you have to know and be aware of if you decide to do C++ development. This book is not like ‘learning C++ in 25 days’ , it’s gives you information about compiler settings, DLL development, process and thread management…., all the topics i didn’t find in other books, but essential for application development on Windows.

C++ for Game Programmers (second edition) The title of the Book is a little bit of misleading, as this is a book to learn C++ as a language and gave you tons of useful info’s about some design decision’s for your code that are general and not only game related. One of the highlights are the chapter about plug-in architecture and information about the STL.