I found "Style: Toward Clarity and Grace" [1] by Joseph M. Williams to be more informative than both of these recommendations, but YMMV. There is a newer version, but I haven't read it.
Kibana / ElasticSearch? It's limited, but pretty and interactive, and gets you a bunch with very limited up-front work. I'm sure you can find some better demos, but here's one: http://parlement.letemps.ch/
HUE is a similar but different alternative. The "search" tab has some great demos, but appears to be down atm: http://demo.gethue.com/
"Most of the solutions for this assignment can be written as one-liners. If you have more, you probably need to rethink your solution. In other words, this assignment needs more thinking (whiteboard, pen and paper) than coding ;-)."
Is it not entirely possible that they're getting some false positives?
Congrats on making it through both. I haven't gotten to the dragon yet... For those interested, you can get a red dragon for significantly less than the newer editions (check amazon).
I used to use a Typematrix 2030, but have gone back to standard keyboards. I use viper and vimpulse in emacs, so I'm currently using the following mappings (in addition to a Dvorak layout):
CapsLock key = Backspace (I hate that reach)
Tilde key = Escape (for VI)
Escape key = CapsLock (for when you need it)
Backspace key = Tilde
My windows keys also function as Control, so that I don't have to be super accurate when using my pinky joint (where my pinky meets my palm) to press it.
Well, maybe I'm not the best person to ask, and my answer was a bit off-the-cuff. The best answer is probably more like: it depends on what you're doing.
But, I just find that Java makes life easier. For example, you don't have to worry about endianess issues. You don't have to worry about portability (as long as you can run a JVM). You can serialize objects across the network easily, and if you want to do stuff like RPC, there's Cajo.
On the C++ side, you have stuff like LAPACK? Though I'm not too sure about this stuff...
Also, Google's Protocol Buffers project is quite helpful in passing data around. (C++, Java, Python, in any combination)