Thread: help with beginning opengl

Basically I have spent a month or so now on the coding basics. From basic cin/cout to pointers and arrays and classes. I recently atempted to try out some simple games in the console window to see what I could pull off. I spent a while searching for things to improve the quality of what I was doing and I came across getch in the conio library for avoiding hitting enter for a command to be processed. I began looking into it and found an article posted by someone explaining that making games in the console was pointless and that if I was serious about trying out some basic games then I should begin opengl and move into a proper 2d enviroment.

Well I have hunted around the interwebs and the information is overwhelming on the subject, basically I would appriciate it if someone in the know could outline several things for me so i can get to the important part of things.

I need advice on..

A good compiler
libraries (I am terrible at installing them they seem to hate me)
Tutorials to get me started.

Any help is really appriciated.

Saying "making games for the console is pointless" is ridiculous. Now, if the person had said, "Attempting to make commercial games for the console is pointless", that's pretty much true for the times. But no person starts out writing Half-Life 2. You have to work your way up--the point of making these games is for the irreplaceable experience. Start with console applications and learn everything you can about them before moving on to graphical applications. Nothing you learn will be a hindrance, and nothing will replace the experience you get from real, practical programming for the console.

But really, you're not going to be ready to develop a mammoth 3D game if you can't program a couple-thousand line text game without breaking a sweat. According to this site, in order to start with the most basic graphics programming, you need to know the following "well":

Operators (+, -, *, /, ++, --, +=, -=, etc)
Controls (if, else, switch)
Loops (while, for)
Functions
Structs
Arrays
References
Pointers
Classes and Objects
How to use a template.
Bitwise and/or.

...To make anything complex you'll need to know inheritance, polymorphism, templates, and STL. Eventually you'll need to know exceptions, operator overloading and the whole language.

If you haven't already, work your way through these topics, and make practice projects for yourself based on the topics. Make a couple 500-line card games or mock board games. Make a 1000-line text adventure game. Make a 2500-line text RPG. You need to learn how to really think about managing large projects before you take them on.

My advice is to get your feet wet--drenched, sopping, soaking--before you move on to GUI or 3D programming. It will be well worth the wait.