Linux Mint Forums

What's the most efficient way? What programs do you recommend? Any books that I should read?

Here's another link for you. http://www.yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/LinuxTutorialC++.html

To be fair, with the amount of interesting and useful stuff you can produce using just the core language + standard library (i.e. not a lot apart from implementing interesting algorithms that only a select handful of people find interesting), C++ may as well be platform-dependent.