JJ> Next, find a system running straight MS-DOS. No Windows, no Linux,
 JJ> etc. Although I understand that you are running Linux and I don't
 JJ> wish to talk you into changing operating systems in your normal
 JJ> business, please realize that there simply aren't any good books
 JJ> written outside of the MS-DOS/Windows operating environments. 
I disagree very strongly with that.  For one thing, I learned C from books 
that assumed that one was using UNIX.  So there *are* such books.  
For another, if one learns from books entitled "Teach yourself Visual C++ for 
Dummies in 21 Days Unleashed" (or whatever) one generally finds that one has 
learned a whole load of Microsoft-specific and DOS-specific idioms which are 
so much useless junk when it comes to advancing to something other than 
Visual C++, or something other than DOS.
The sad truth is that books with "Visual C++", "Borland C++", "Turbo C++" or 
whatever in the title are more often than not going to be nothing more than 
re-hashes of the library manuals for those products, along with tutorials and 
code examples that are highly specific to that one implementation (where they 
aren't simply trite and superficial), and highly misleading to the novice 
programmer as a result.  And *those* are the sort of books that pack the 
bookshelves for DOS, crowding out all others.
I'm not the world's greatest fan of linux, but I'll freely grant that the 
original poster, with GNU C/C++ on linux, probably has an excellent C and C++ 
learning environment, since all of the tools will have the authentic "UNIX 
feel" to them, and the actual C/C++ runtime environment will *very* closely 
match that of the abstract C/C++ models.
A novice C/C++ programmer really *doesn't* need to learn all about far and 
huge pointers, , farmalloc(), int86s(), and all of the other junk 
that DOS C++ programming books will teach him, only to have to "unlearn" it 
later, as they inevitably will have to.  Luckily, the original poster is in 
the fortunate position of not having to learn any of it in the first place.
 ¯ JdeBP ®
--- FleetStreet 1.19 NR
---------------