I coded VB at work before making th jump to C for a small utility. A text parser. I was amazed that I could process 5 mb in about a second, where in vb it would have taken about 20 secs (no kidding, write a mime encoder efficiently in vb )

I''m now programming happily in c++ but was actually stunted for a while by my exposure to C. My advise, learn full c++ from the start then go back and learn the roots.

Make sure you learn STL *BEFORE* learning C. The world has enough linked list implementations..
gimp

Theres nooo point in learning C before C++ really. By all means I encourage learning BASIC or PASCAL or VisualBasic, or anything you can think of, but C++ is heavilt derived from C. As someone said, it is a superset. Don''t bother yourself with C.

From someone who went BASIC -> Pascal -> C++, I''d say start off with C++, but buy books! If you go for, say, BASIC first, you will learn a lot of things that you will have to unlearn later, you will occasionally get the 2 syntaxes mixed up (leaving the parentheses off C if statements and adding semicolons at the end of BASIC statements are the big ones ), and will find C++ to be very unforgiving once you get used to being ''pampered'' by BASIC. Instead, I''d say that following a good book and getting into C++ directly will teach you better style and give a better appreciation for some of the low-level considerations. Just don''t expect that online tutorials will be much good at teaching you as a beginner: they aren''t, they are much better for teaching intermediate programmers how to achieve a certain feature or result.

As a final note, Dijkstra (you may have heard of his path-finding algorithm) once said:
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."