Do you guys think this noobie bought some good starter material?

[Conquest]

This is my suggestion- download pdf/epub/other softcopy formats from torrents or somewhere else (TPB has great torrents for them which contains like 1000+ books) download all of them at once and then do a google search with something like "best book on <name of teh subject>" and read the soft copy a few pages . if you like it buy the hardcopy . i usually rely on comments on stackoverflow since you can actually find questions like these there a lot .
for example this link gives you a detailed list of good c programming books
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/562303/the-definitive-c-book-guide-and-list
similar threads exist for other topics as well.
Reversing: Secrets of Reverse Engineering - this is a great book you bought. but i will say buy something on x86 asm as well.
About the IDA pro book . its more like a reference style . Definitely worth buying . it doesnt teach you much new things if you are already using IDA but solves a lot of problem and gives you a lot of tricks
Goodluck