It is certainly worth it to buy a book and read it !!
You should get yourself a good reference manual for the C language. Once you know C well, C++ will flow like water. The best reference manual I've read so far is "C: A Reference Manual (5th edition)" (
http://www.careferencemanual.com). Note that you'll also need a tutorial book, because a reference manual will tell you how to use the C standard libraries efficiently, how to write clean code and what is the state of the art in programming, but it won't tell you the basics if you've never written some sort of computer program before.
I don't know any good C tutorial book (I sorta didn't need one). But what I would find of the highest importance in such a book would be that the book goes at such a pace that the reader understands fully, *totally*, what he is doing. Everytime. Else you'll end up wrapped in class creation wizards, third-party tools that are supposed to do the work for you and MFC, and in the end you won't understand half of what you code.
What are you experienced in ? PHP ? Javascript ? BASIC ? programmable calculators like Casio or TI ? If you're *completely* new to programming, it won't be easy for you if you start off hacking a bot.
If you want to hack one, perhaps the simplest one for you is botman's HPB_bot template (not the full release).