I'm a practising engineer who needed to learn to write software to model physical systems and go on to develop a basic graphical user interface. I spent ages deliberating over what book to get. This book was GREAT at taking you through from absolute basics of C++ to some of the harder but very useful stuff to do with Classes, the dreaded pointers (gulp...) etc. It does not teach you how to do graphics, but having gone through the book carefully I was then able to learn to use a graphics library (I chose SDL, but could have tackled basic OpenGL) relatively easily, because I understood the underlying basics behind the language.
The author has a sense of humour which made it a digestible read. The book goes at a good pace for me, assumes no prior knowledge but doesn't dilly dally on the really easy stuff, then takes it steady on the more tricky bits. The example games included are very good, but I ended up inventing my own as it was more fun. I keep going back to this book for reference.