Darkfeign

I love the project idea, and arduino is definitely something I'd like to get involved with after seeing a housemate purchase a Raspberry Pi. Currently too busy to work on anything with exams coming up, but after that I'm hoping to get learning Clojure, maybe advancing my Python a little and help out with the Clojure-py project.

Bloodshed Dev C++ looks to be compatible with windows, given that it uses MinGW designed to port GCC to windows. You'll be fine.

Seeing as it's donation-based, it makes sense to accept any form of currency.

Programming Principled and Practices Using C++ A thorough intro to the language by the creator himself.. if you can spare the money. Should be all you need.

I would suggest the usual beginning resource for learning Python, which is here: http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/ So naturally, I would suggest Python if you're looking at getting started. As for a project, Python can do a lot of things. It depends what you're into but maybe you can try and start simple with the Fibonacci numbers and go from there.

CDs may disappear but Blu-Ray will be around for a while, no doubt. Given the storage capacity and the reduction in surface damage/errors on the discs. There's no reason to completely remove physical media, as it's still important and sometimes flash drives are not suitable or robust enough.

This advice is pretty horrible. I completely disagree with skipping on studying Java. It's by far the most powerful cross-platform language out there and is huge in the industry. It is also freely available for virtually every platform and the development kit is extremely powerful and enabling. C++ is a great language to learn, but Java may be just as suitable for someone looking to program in something similar to C/C++ without needing to concern themselves with memory management.

There are well-founded culling methods for rendering engines and while I'm not sure I understand what you're proposing fully, would point-cloud rendering not require crazy amounts of data storage for things like shadows and other lighting effects in a scene? You would have to store all possible positions for light sources, and this seems highly inefficient for moving objects in a scene? Just some thoughts. Like I said, I'm not entirely sure I understand the approach as I haven't come across this before.

I would suggest this as a python resource: http://learnpythonthehardway.org/

I'd check out Sublime Text editor if you're looking for a decent cross-platform editor. And yes, linux with sublime and the terminal are all that are required. IDEs are fantastic for getting things done, and I couldn't imagine Android development without Eclipse, but it's nice to be able to use the terminal and a text editor to figure out your mistakes on your own.

C++ for game development surely? As the industry standard, whether big or small. It should not be limited to 'crazy graphics'.

Python is an extremely powerful language and avoids difficult-to-learn syntax for new programmers. So definitely find some nice python tutorials and examples online, it's definitely more powerful than it seems. And to the 'people have done actual programs with it' part - well yeah.. the majority of web-servers running high-demand services use python recently. Facebook and Twitter rely on python a lot as web servers and to provide other services that previously PHP struggled to keep up with. Python is extremely powerful and shouldn't be put down as 'you can make actual programs sometimes'. Just saying. Python is becoming huge and is in high demand for a wide range of jobs.

Given the state of computer hardware in the past decade the C language certainly isn't as popular as it used to be. Many people began learning C before approaching C++ but it's difficult to learn a language like C when most modern languages use an object-oriented approach. C++ was built to be the successor of C, but like all modern languages, it needed to retain compatibility with C because of C's low-level access and minute footprint on the system. Java, for example, is a cross-platform language that allows java bytecode to run on any platform because it is interpreted by the platform's virtual machine. But the individual virtual machine versions (platform specific) are still implemented in C because they need to be able to compile Java bytecode at runtime to make the language fast and efficient. C will always remain fast and efficient, but C++ achieves similar performance and it's doubtful that any modern language can replace these without removing their need in the new language's implementation.

Computer Science is a pretty broad topic, as a whole. Are there any areas of specific interest to you? If you're looking to get into programming and haven't tried anything before I'd suggest looking at Python books for beginners that teach with examples. Python is a fantastic language that's great for new programmers, and still used in industry - it's even taking over PHP in a lot of web-development applications. I'd also suggest something like Essentials of Computer Architecture: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Essentials-Computer-Architecture-Comer/dp/B0041VDNSK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1367161515&sr=8-1&keywords=essentials+of+computer+architecture If you're looking at degree-level knowledge and already have a fairly good understanding of hardware, you might be more interested in the above for finding out what your computer is actually doing with the hardware and how operating systems manage everything.