It's got one! "The C Programming Language" by Kernighan and Richie ;-)
What it could really use some deprecation of the more idiotic, dangerous, useless features (eg explicit constructors should be the default, unbraced single line blocks only introduce bugs and have no positive value at all). They should also mandate that standards conforming STL implementations ship with a standard set of benchmarks you can run on the hardware you're targeting. All the C++ "anointed smart people" complain people use the wrong STL datastructures but don't show any cleverness at all in solving that problem.
No 2 C++ hackers agree on what constitutes "The Good Parts" witness every single C++ style guide ever endorsing a different subset of the language. C++11/14 has not changed this. Modulo different targets make that subset different from the point of view of the very same hacker.
In fairness I think C++ has had a lot more compromise in its "design" than C did. C has a bunch of issues but it's understandable. C++, nobody understands it all, and it changes so much from compiler to compiler, accross hardware platforms and so on.
Pure virtual base protected friend member functions aren't in C.
C also changes a lot between compilers,specially thanks to undefined behavior and vendor extensions. A feature C++ inherited from C.
Even between versions of the same compiler. Quite bad in the embedded space.
Lack of bounds checking for native arrays, null terminated strings, arrays that decay into pointers, include files instead of proper modules, implicit conversions are among the inherited features.
>Pure virtual base protected friend member functions aren't in C.
No they are not, but as someone that knows C++ since 1993, I fail to see the problem.
Pure virtual base => requires redefinition in derived classes
Protected => only accessible in derived classes
Friend => can be used by protected member functions of friend classes
Not needed in every day C++ code, but enterprise architects love this type of flexibility, which doesn't have anything to do with safety.
C++ could really use a "C++: The Good Parts" book.