[TheOtherHobbes]

K&R actually describes C. You can pick up the original K&R from way back, and it's not so different to the latest ANSI C. The differences aren't quite trivial, but they're not so big they're going to distract anybody for long.

It's probably impossible for any book to fully describe C++ because it'a a perpetually moving target on a three year update cycle.

There are always new idioms and techniques to learn, but they keep being changed/added without any obvious coherent design strategy or logical goal.

Books can barely keep up. Stroustrop's own C++ introduction is for C++11, which is already five years and nearly two releases old.

[rtpg]

For a long time this wasn't really the case. In between C+98 and C++11, Stroustrop's book contained essentially everything you would want to know about C++, including details on how to implement the STL yourself!

The end of the book even included a grammar for C++ (with a slight comment about how the grammar wasn't exact because of C++ context sensitivity)