Evening all,
I know its the off topic forum and that DB forums are not really the best place for this sort of questions but I realize some programmers find there way to this forum so hopefully some one could help me, and by all means if you know a better suiting forum for this questions please show me the way =p.


I know Pascal (or at lest, used to know heh ) and I am interested in actually buildings real life programs, I figured C++ is what I am looking for, but so far I am having a slight problem at finding out just how to get started.
I have this great C++ book(IRL), the only issue is that this book assumes that you already know how to use Microsoft's Visual Studio and that you know some C++, which I don't.

For beginners I found out the following way to get started: "Ada" witch is some sort of programing language witch is a lot like C++ and has many beginners guides for, so I figured I could go like:
1) Learn Ada (and use all this nice beginners guides\online books\examples).
2) Convert to C++ by comparing the syntax defiance between the two.

This still levies me in the cold in regards to knowing how to handle\worth with Visual Studio, as far as obtaining Visual Studio, and programing well:
1) ADA's programing invaiormente (compiler and what have you) is free
2) Microsoft released Virtual PC IMG that contains Vista+Office 2007+Visual Studio 2005\8 and some other helpful tools, for free, it expires in a year and by witch time I imagine they will have a newer version (as I found in there archive a VPC IMG of XP+VS05\office 2003 that expired just a month after the newer one was released).

So it comes down to the following questions:
1) How do one go about learning how to use\work with Visual studio (preferable the last version of it)?
2) Whats the best (or at lest, a good) way to learn C++, is it first learning Ada and then moving to C++ (Remember, I do know Pascal to a degree and I already know the basics and theory of programing so it might be a waist of time, to a degree), or is there some nice beginners guide\online book(or amazon IRL book) for beginners in C++?

Thanks


EDIT: Here are some links
1) That MS VPC IMG: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...7-948bc6957812
2) Ada related stuff:
* http://goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au/~dale/ada/aln.html
* http://www.adatutor.com/
* http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming