Visual or no?(C++)

Aloha,
well I totally agree with what everyone here is saying.
However what I would suggest as well is to first read some of the books/articles on the basics of programming. The books that dont exactly focus on a language but on how to construct a program. There is a book called How computer programming works. I wish that i had a book like that when i started out.
I believe that you need to understand programming, essentially how to think like a computer in order to write a program that will speak with a computer correctly. because its great if the graphics are nice, and all that, but if the computer is having problems understanding your code, then that program pretty much sucks.
I would suggest this to anyone who wants to learn how to program in any language, if you can learn to speak with your computer through whatever language you choose, and you become fluent, then you can ask it to do anything within our world.
-=Levi=-

I would tend to agree with most of the previous posts. C and its spawn are still very important and must be learned. Additionally, M$'s release of .NET should not be dismised, for better or for worse, M$ is extremely important, especially in business. The propaganda on the .NET development environment is that it levels the programming field as a result of using an intermediate compiler that takes various languages (C, JAVA, FORTRAN, etc...) to a common language (prior to compiling the code to machine code) [cough cough overhead cough cough]. The idea being that this would allow various programmers who know different languages to work together on the same project. It is my opinion that C is probably the best to start of on as good C programmers generally has a better understanding of the nuts and bolts of programming as it hides less of the routines that are generally done behind the scenes in languages like JAVA and C++. Therefore, a good C programmer will generally produce much "tighter" code than someone who started on a more "friendly" language - I have personally seen a great deal of this among among JAVA coders who because the language has automatic "garbage collection" produce really messy code because they do not think about memory handling when writing a program. Finally, once you have a firm grasp on one language it is easy to pick up other that are similar (e.g. C++, C#, VS C, Java, etc.).