You're right, C++ is like a huge load of tribal knowledge. It's not like a monolithic language, it is like a group of languages tied together, a swiss army knife if you will. Try take them gradually, in the order of their historical development: C with its preprocessor, then C++ classes with all their stuff, then generic programming (templates), and finally - in-depth stl. You may be told that it's best to start with stl because it was developed for (among other things) the beginners to avoid shooting themselves in the foot, but I find it to be just a coverage for higher-level programming (used best when you already know its under-the-hood low-level stuff).