"<<" is a bitwise shift. You were probably referring to accessing the C functions to print to standard output.
This has been discussed to death, even here on Evilzone. Look up "C vs. C++" on any search engine and enjoy the infighting. But nonetheless:
It seems to me that you've been learning from awful resources (except for Learn C the Hard Way, which is quite decent). Protip: avoid any book titled "Teach Yourself X in Y t". These tend to be poorly written for the lowest common denominator and often have erroneous syntax or they display poor coding conventions. Read
this article by Peter Norvig to get a more realistic view.
How exactly do you consider yourself being behind knowing C? You have to realize C was written back in a time when hardware was constrained, efficient allocation of memory and resources was crucial to writing programs and most systems programming was still done in Assembly (machine code mnemonics).
Now that you've started with C, you should continue because it'll give you a very solid foundation for programming later on. You'll learn memory management, pointers and basic low-level concepts, not to mention that a good amount of modern programming languages all descended from C. C is also very likely the underlying language of your operating system, for instance. Your system was designed to handle C, and it is still the goto (pun intended) language for embedded systems and anything that requires interaction with the internals of an operating system.
C and C++ are completely different beasts. C is inherently much simpler than C++. C++ is a gargantuan and behemoth of functionality, most of which people don't use all too often. Rather, most people treat C++ as C with Classes. Not to say you shouldn't learn it, but be weary of it.
Other books on C you would be interested in:
K&R C (yes, the gospel, can't go without it),
C Programming: A Modern Approach and once you've reached a certain level, try going into
Expert C Programming: Deep C Secrets, which will both teach you and no less amuse you.
Finally:
http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/ (for lulz)