Udemy: I can recommend this one F. Mitropoulos, C++ - From Beginner to Beyond.

maybe both? i got into programming for the creative parts. i love to draw so i figured with programming i could eventually bring my drawings to life. i planned on attempting some type of homework/study game for my kid as a learning project. 

2 hours ago, nrdalrt said:

maybe both? i got into programming for the creative parts. i love to draw so i figured with programming i could eventually bring my drawings to life. i planned on attempting some type of homework/study game for my kid as a learning project. 

That's exactly how I made my first completed game. My son and I built a simple tiled maze game that recorded your time over multiple levels. He immediately understood the arrays of 1's and 0's and made his own mazes on graph paper and transcribed it into arrays. The next year, we took that same "engine" and made it into a mining game where you had to collect resources and upgrade your pickaxe to dig through the harder stuff get the best rewards. The neat thing about the whole thing is that we have those games on our computers and I can play it and look back on those days as if I were looking at a photograph. Learn programming while you create memories.

The year after that, we made a board game together. ?

that's so awesome!!! I absolutely suck at homework help most of the time. I keep wishing there was a game like app that I could put my daughter's actual school work into for her to play.  Her spelling and vocabulary words, math that's on topic with what she's learning all in a virtual world that can be updated as she progresses through the school year and that she'll think is fun. with no ads!!!

Well I can't give you homework help advice as it would be off-topic and have my own site you would benefit from but it would be considered advertising my own site by the forum rules...

What I gathered from your posts is you are trying to make a 3-dimensional game for your child's educational purposes?

You can check my site in my forum signature either way.

Well basic idea here is to rate yourself.

Coding/game development is hard, but you can still use easier to use 3-dimensional graphic/game engines.

From 1-5, 1 representing very easy, to 5 very hard.

And just assess how good you are already at coding.

An example:

1 would be Unity, 5 something like Direct X 12.

Another type of self-assessment, you should try making a simple 2-dimensional shape display Windows program; before actually learning 3-dimensional physics, math, texture making, polygons and rendering. If you can make such a proggy in 5 days, you are good to go.

This book is simple for beginners who want to study graphics programming from scratch: WebGL Programming Guide I rewrite examples from JavaScript to TypeScript/WebGL and C#/OpenGL3. I place TS/WebGL examples on Playground, for example: ch02/HelloCanvas: https://next.plnkr.co/edit/SPaDtGlLZ1ZlgRhd?preview

I like this book: JavaScript for Kids: A Playful Introduction to Programming

15 hours ago, nrdalrt said:

I keep wishing there was a game like app that I could put my daughter's actual school work into for her to play.  Her spelling and vocabulary words, math that's on topic with what she's learning all in a virtual world that can be updated as she progresses

That sounds like you already have a concrete idea in mind. The you should maybe focus on that and learn arround progressing your idea. So you have a goal you could schedule your programming progress to.

If you whish to do this kind of software this way, you should read about programming principles also; modularity for example is a must have so you won't end up (so quickly, you'll end up doing this anyway) refactoring your whole code every time you try to add a new feature.

I don't think you want something realy complex and capable of running on 10 platforms at the same time so you could try C# as your primary language as it helps you with a lot of tools and articles and also comes with OpenTK that itself is just a wrapper arround the OpenGL/Vulkan hardware level drivers but also offers a lot of tutorials and a great community. Modular code also benefits from C#'s reflection features

3D programming would be a long term goal, learning a language other than RPG is gona be my first goal since i'd love to start moving away from RPG and find a more creative type of programming. i downloaded unity and i'm gona start playing with it and figuring it out since i'd never even heard of it before yesterday