Don''t stick with basic.
I started out about 6-7 years ago on qbasic and moved from their to turbo pascal and then C++. Trust me, moving from qbasic or any basic to c++ is a HUGE step. I recommend doing stuff in dos with c++ before getting into windows. Unless you learn the data structres and pointer system, windows will be a big scary thing. Also it takes time to adjust from linear programming to asyncrnous programming. (spell error) The Genisis tutorial pointed out is a great one, I learned windows programming from it. As far as compliers, if your doing dos, you might want to stick with borland, BUT doing windows programing or directx stuff in anything outside of MSVC++ is hard and requires alot of effort to setup. Instead of dling the DirectX sdk, you might want to download the MS Platform SDK, it includes all sorts of SDK''s including DirectX, the only problem is that it''s a beefy dl, although you can select which parts to DL. Another great resource besides this site is the MSDN library. msdn.mircosoft.com, and if you buy msvc++ 6 you get a software edition of it. It''s useful for all kinds of stuff, sorta like borlands help files.



-Scott

As far as languages go, you probably want to look at two things. First of all, for gaming you probably want to go with VC++, however for school, (at least if the school you go to is any good,) you will be forced to do all your programming in a unix environment, which means the best IDE you will get will probably be xemacs, and you will probably compile in g++ or gcc.

It is definitely worth while to learn to code and compile without using an IDE like VC++, since you don''t always know what tools you''ll have to use in your job.

Dustin