>The goodness was actually the book. The writing was simple and clear, the examples were self-contained and practical. It was a perfect textbook.

Very True.

All documentation that came with the then OSes, Toolchains etc. were top-notch. Far better then many of the textbooks being published today. I still have a volume of early C++ papers (some authored by Stroustrup himself) which came with the SCO Unix C++ toolchain. That was the first place i learnt about "C++ Internals" i.e. vtables etc.