[skunkworks]

Goofyballer's post is a perfect example of the "hardcore" answer given to people that ask for some guidance as a beginner. C is most definitely not the first language I would want to teach someone. I'd rather have you thinking about general but very important concepts in CS rather than trying to figure out how to manage memory or learn pointer arithmetic. C as a first language is something that hardcore geeks seem to espouse.

Dane, most CS programs aren't really about teaching programming languages to students. You'll definitely learn at least one language pretty well (Java), and you may pick up a few similar ones (C/C++, VB) or a few strange ones. But the thing is, most teachers only use them as a tool to teach about deeper problems and solutions. You will very probably never have an assignment that explicitly teaches you how to create a connection to a database (something very useful in the real world), but you definitely will be learning the different algorithms used to search for a value in a binary tree.

The best preparation for school would be for you to learn your object oriented programming fundamentals through and through. What is a class, what is an object, what are functions in a true OOP sense, polymorphism, inheritance, etc. The most important thing is to learn how to think in an OOP way (a programming paradigm).

Good luck with the video game programming/design. I never took the video game course offered at my university, but I did take a 3D graphics class (OpenGL) and almost failed miserably. By the way, that was all done in C [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]