nymia: Sure, a meritocracy sounds good. Which set of merits are we going to go by?

I'm wondering...
Is it just me, or do mirwin's diary entries look like somebody has trained some sort of Markov-chain-based text generating bot on a couple gigs worth of old diaries and set it loose? If that's the case, I really wish the bot owner would set the output to a shorter length.

C++
I'm taking part in a group at work that's reading through Lippman and Lajoie's C++ Primer. We're up to chapter 8, I think, and it's been completely disappointing. (I guess I should preface this by saying that while all the code I generally write is in Perl, I have messed around in C, and I've read a book or two that touched on or intro'd C++ concepts.)

First, the book is a hideous mish-mash of core C++ stuff and STL techniques. Worse, fairly advanced concepts are touched on, sometimes at length, without any background. For example, there's a vector class implementation at the end of chapter 2 (IIRC). Great -- but we don't know what a class is, OOP hasn't been mentioned at all, let alone things like function and class templates.

So, I'm getting a very negative view of C++ from all of this, one that it may or may not deserve. For instance, the whole language seems huge! The syntax feels really ugly too. The more experienced hands at work are telling me that this is just due to the mix of core and STL in the book, and that the actual language isn't that bad; it's just that the STL sucks.

Anyway, I'm sticking with it for the time being; it certainly can't get any worse. Does anybody out there have any 'intro-to-C++' books that they can say good things about?