Thanks for all the encouragement.
So far I have to say that it's giving me a nice headache. On the one hand, I'm seeing where a lot of the PB stuff (especially 4.0) is coming from and knowing PB helps. On the other hand, it feels like C++ is just a lot of crap tacked on to C. And tacked on badly. Kind of like when you're editing a really old program without a lot of time. You should just rewrite it to make it better/more compatible but instead you have to just add on stuff that makes it work for now.
Granted, I haven't done much with it beyond reading (so far) but that's just the feeling I get from it. 5 billion different ways to create a pointer for everything. It's scary. Makes me realize how lucky I am that PB is so nice, easy and fast
Incidentally, I read "Code" by Charles Petzold over the weekend. That was a real interesting read. It gave a lot of background on why things are like they are with computers. Some parts were a little blehhh but mostly I enjoyed it.