err...im a newbie, someone please help me out.

ok. I learned truebasic (stupid). Im pretty good with it. Now i got microsoft visual c++ and have been fooling around with it not knowing what i was doing. im very confused with all these mfc, win32 app, makefile, etc. stuff. anyways, what do you guys mean when you say "blah blah 'include graphics'"? Also, the 12 year old kid said "the first 3 weeks i could only make output in the black console window". Thats all i can do, lol and i thought that was good. you mean you can have much cooler stuff than that? dude, someone please give me a thorough explanation on all this stuff. thanks

> someone please give me a thorough explanation on all this stuff

C/C++ are hardly languages which can be explained in a single post on a buletin board. I suggest you get yourself a good book on C++ and learn the language. Deitel & Deitel's book is good for that. After that you can concentrate on a particular API you are interested in, such as WinAPI (Programming Windows 5th Edition by Charles Petzold is a good book to teach you that) then you can move on to learning DirectX or OpenGL (I assume you want to be making games).

> you mean you can have much cooler stuff than that?

Oh yeah - make 3d games, OS's, anything you want, really...

I have never tried the microsoft compiler, but I here it kind of rugged to start with. Try reading the docs. Does it have a tutorial?
If it still seems too hard try downloading zipslack from

www.slackware.com
it drops right on your windows file system and gives you a complete programming enviroment as well as a working linux system. The compiler is ansi c c++ and will work with any ansi c c++ tutorial out there. It doesn't have an ide but an editor and the man pages will get you started. Try
http://lgdc.sunsite.dk/
and go to the programming section. There is a great intro to programming by Andre Courbot. He tells you all about how to get started with the gcc compiler.