Knowing C++ Beyond a Beginner Level

Nerval's Lobster writes: C++ is not an easy language to master, but many people are able to work in it just fine without being a 'guru' or anything along those lines. That being said, what separates C++ beginners from those with 'intermediate' skills, or even masters? According to this Dice article, it comes down to knowledge of several things, including copy constructors, virtual functions, how to handle memory leaks, the intricacies of casting, Lambda functions for C++11, (safe) exception handling and much more. All that being said, is there one particular thing or point that separates learners from masters?

Comments

Experts...

[Anonymous Coward]

know better than to use C++

Re:Knowing when not to

[AmiMoJo]

If you need really high performance you don't use most of the C++ features anyway, and end up basically writing straight C. In fact a lot of C++ code is like that, using OO to allocate memory and logically arrange the code.