"Can you recommend any C++ books?"
"I don't recommend C++."

Afterwards I reluctantly come up with some names. I beginning to notice that I eventually end up mentioning the Scott Meyers "Effective C++" books. The last time I did this I started to wonder why I say this?

When I first read "Effective C++" I was horrified. If I derived any pleasure out of it, it was comparable to the morbid curiosity of going to witness an execution (I probably would not do that though, if I ever got such a chance. I don't have the stomach for it). Back to C++ - Firstly there was no way I was going remember all of that. Secondly I felt deeply uncomfortable. In time I realized that the whole book was written in the style of demonstrating "effective" usages of C++, while what it truly was is a careful documentation of the flaws of the language. Every chapter in that book talks of a language flaw in excruciating detail and how to live with it. That book should have been called "Defective C++".

Then there was "More Effective C++" which essentially did more of the same.  Here is what the language does, here is what you think it would do, here is what you'd like it to do and you put these together and it blows up in your face. In time, my intellectual immune system kicked in and started erasing most of my memories about all this.

So why do I recommend the "Defective" and "More Defective" books? My first recommendation would be to get out of the situation, don't deal with the language if that's possible. If not, and you intend to get it to serve you (instead of the converse) you need to quickly understand that most of the abstractions it provides are leaky. There are hardly any non-leaky abstractions that C++-land provides. (Some people associate this behavior with some notion of "freedom" - I trust evolution will take of those folk.)

So if your abstractions are leaky, in that they are going to have strange interactions with each other under-the-hood, then you should quickly start developing an understanding of what happens under the abstractions you are given. Your effectiveness as a developer becomes proportional to your understanding of what happens under the surface. Hence the "defective" C++ books are a useful read.