plague_dog32

Yes, stackoverflow is a regular place I visit such a great site.

I've been working in the games industry for 6 years, favorite languages are C++ and C# though I find myself in C++ less and less (tools programmer).

I've been in the games industry as a tools programmer for about 6 years. If you really love programming all you need to do is just immerse yourself and learn as much as you can. Side/personal projects are a good way to keep your skills sharp and can make good examples of what your capable of to potential employers. Really the big thing is you need to find what type of programming you want to do and focus on that. Find out what tools/languages/apps are the best in that field and learn them inside and out. Hope that helps.

C++ is much harder to get started in making games than C#, the comments about memory management being better with C++ are true but are generally not an issue unless your programming for a console or mobile device. As long as you do a little research on the do's and don'ts of whatever language you end up going with C++ Java and C# can all get very similar performance. Specifically if I were to recommend one I would recommend C# and XNA if your new to programming, there are a ton of tutorials for it.

DirectX is the standard for PC and Xbox, OpenGL is used on everything else. Having used both DirectX is much friendlier than OpenGL in my opinion. That said if you just looking to make games for fun something like Unity or the UDK would be a good place to start if you don't care as much about having to implement either in C++ and just want to make a game.