C++ is a monstrous language with a steep learning curve - hence it's really relatively unsuitable as a beginners language. Sorry to be blunt, but that's just the way I see it!
I agree, but I'm not sure what a good beginner language would be...
for a complete beginner EVERY language has a big learning curve. it really depends on what you're trying to accomplish.
when talking about college, the difficulty of a language really depends on the skill of the teacher.
It just means that you'll need to put a lot of effort in and bog yourself down with a lot more internal details of the machine than if you'd started with something like Python. Memory management is the key one - in C++ you're expected to do it all yourself. In more modern languages it's done for you automatically.
I think that there may be a reason for that though...
majoring in electronics and computer engineering technology.
when talking about electronics, often times there is no automatic memory management going on for you, I agree that in most modern languages there is no need to worry about memory management, but this is not the only approach, some people necessarily have to be worried about memory management.
At my college they use C++ in the intro courses and it seems fine. As long as you don't try to jump in to really complicated aspects right at the start, I'd say it's not much more difficult than other languages.
The skill of the teacher will depend on how difficult things are.
If you've literally no exposure to programming at all. then as a primer I'd suggest that you start by looking at a language like BYOB, it's not going to teach you programming, but it is going to teach you about laying out a program, logical progression, making decisions and loops etc.
if you're already comfortable with these ideas then I'd suggest getting a copy of something like C++ for dummies and going through the book that should give you a comfortable introduction to the language.
There are very few on-line resources that give a good introduction to complex languages, they all assume that you know how and why things are going on, mostly because -as berry pointed out above, complex languages don't make good starting points.