I don't major in CS but I have to use C++ and QT for my PhD research. Although I had pretty good general understanding of IT and some experience in web programming, I struggled to teach myself C++ from scratch. I tried a few popular books, but none of them worked very well. As someone said, "the trouble with C++ is there's an awful lot to remember". Those big thick books are often quite easy to follow from page to page, but very quickly all the details become overwhelming. C++ is a powerful and flexible language that incorporates different paradigms so there're always many different ways of doing things but quite often (particularly for beginners) we only need to know the best practices. As Bjarne suggests: "A focus on details can be very distracting and lead to poor use of the language. You wouldn't try to learn a foreign language from a dictionary and grammar, would you?" (http://www.research.att.com/~bs/learn.html). Ironically, most of the big books I read did exactly the same for me. They all tend to provide too many details upfront. You could end up reading 500 pages but still don't have a clue what's the correct way of programming in C++. Plus you'll probably forget what read before...
I felt a great relief when I came across this book. I would say the authors have done a marvellous job. From the very beginning they teach you how to program in the C++ way, more precisely in the Qt way. The book suggests Qt coding style is not "pure" C++ but that's a different story. By throwing away all the irrelevant bits, they give you a good idea of the whole picture so that you'll be on the right track very quickly. Then you can let you knowledge grow by accumulating more technical details - it's just a matter of time and practice. Of course, a big thick book is still needed as reference. If you don't know anything about programming, I would suggest you read the first few chapters of one of the primers, then switched to this book. I feel it still requires some basic programming background.
I would definitely give it a five star and recommend to anyone learning Qt