Where to start programing?

Hello all Im new to programing and have read alot of threads on this site which I'm finding very helpful. My main knowledge is in web building and it isnt a lot. I'm wanting to learn to write a program that is geared for the real estate industry (acounting, property management, filing of listings and so on) I know I may be months or years from it but would like to know where to start.
I started out in Frontpage for webbuilding for my first web page and got my feet wet and got a Idea of what it was all about then went on to learn some html coding and javascript to get what I needed for my new site that Frontpage couldn't give me. Any way saying all that to say this, would it be best to experiment with Visual basic 6 or the visual studio.net 2003 to get my feet wet and help me understand the consepts? It also seemed more people thought c++ with a GCC compiler was a good place to start.
I'm having trouble finding the GCC compiler, I've went to this site http://gcc.gnu.org/ but can't seem to find where to download it. Is there anything else I might need geting started?

Thanks Bondjoe

hi, welcome to the forums ;)

i would suggest you start with Visual Basic or with C. i would personally prefer C, but some others will not.

for C i suggest you download dev-cpp, this is an freeware compiler which i personally like better then the one that microsoft sells...

i have written a beginners tutorial on C in which you might be interested. you can click on the "other tutorials written: 2" under my username to view it, or you can go to my site: http://www.white-scorpion.nl/tutorials/tutorials.html .

also check out http://www.freeprogrammingresources.com , this site also has a lot of links for VB and C which might prove very useful.


i hope this helps ;)