Sounds good, any information is good information. Windows Game Programming for Dummies is going to be over your head (no offense) if you're just starting out. I'm just coming around to it utilizing some of the win32 programming examples it has (one of the first books I bought, too) and I've been teaching myself C++ for about a year now, on and off. I haven't read the other two books you bought, though.

Read my post below, actually the link to my post the post below points to, heh. It has some links and I make a semi-applicable comment regarding he pace I learned the basic C++ stuff.

As you start to work through the first tutorials and chapters of your books you will be doing a lot of similar looking stuff over again and likely seeing many alternative ways of doing similar techniques that don't seem to do anything particularly exciting. Do your best to stick with it and try to understand 'why' certain code is written the way it is and not simply what it accomplishes. Lastly, don't feel like you have to rush headlong into game programming. It is extremely useful to have a wide range of basic to intermediate code topics like linked lists, pointers, proper use of classes, function overloading, and maybe some STL under your belt before you tackle DirectX 8 or anything else that makes use of such techniques. At a minimum know the C++ language itself in and out; this and a knowledge of any commonly used standard functions (iostream, STL, string) will make learning the actual game related stuff ten times easier and much more enjoyable. Good luck! This was not meant to be intimidating, I didn't follow any of the above advice when I started and I'm still breathing :D just remember to have fun with whatever your doing.

Edited by - eotvos on August 30, 2001 6:48:16 PM

Before learning DirectX, it might help to know the Win32 API. Programming Windows by Charles Petzold or Windows 98 Programming from the Ground Up by Herbert Schildt are good choices. Tricks of the Windows Game Programming Gurus does have an introduction on the basics of Win32, but it only teaches enough to get a DirectX app running. If you want to be able to write map editors and stuff, you should at least learn either the Win32 API or MFC.

No,
Just make a console application in MSVC++.

Hope that helps.