Well, that depends on the uninitiated. Those who come from a more "user-friendly" language, e.g. Java, are pretty much safe - they can continue with C++ and its Standard Library as if it was Java (as long as they respect the RAII principle). The C people, on the other hand, should expect to be bitten on the ass many times (try, for example, to use the pointer to an element of an std::vector after you have pushed some more elements into it!), and so you are right, those people are, unfortunately, better off knowing the internals.