I would like to say, for those that are looking into development, the best thing to have is a proper toolset! SO, for those developing on Windows 7 (or newer) and starting out, heeeere's a few tips.
For C++ development on Windows, aside from using Visual Studio, I highly suggest installing and using MSYS2
https://msys2.github.io/ . MSYS2 is arguably, and at least what I find, to be the best and most current and updated command line Unix-like shell, a complete rewrite of the older MSYS and based on Cygwin, a POSIX compatibility layer, and MinGW-w64, a more actively developed and updated port of the GNU toolset than the regular MinGW, with the added benefit of 64-bit support, amongst other various improvements. Using the package manager pacman and the huge library of packages, libraries and tools that you can retrieve with it and use in the shell, makes it utterly invaluable. C++, C++ libraries for physics and other things, such as box2d, bullet, allegro, OpenGL and OpenAL... you can have python, perl, openssl, ruby, Lua, Qt... Linux tools like vim and nano, and you can use git, subversion, mercurial, ssh. Which is, I find, better than having to install everything through typical, repetitively tedious installers, or other programs you canse for like one thing (I'm looking at you, PuTTY). It's godlike.
WHEN YOU DO INSTALL IT, and this goes also for Java Development Kits, install this to the lowest branch of your harddrive as possible, i.e. "C:\\msys2\" or "C:\\Java\jdk8u72\". In addition, you should set up your workspaces for each language also close to the root of your drive, so that it's easier and quicker to access with a command-line and something like, Git. For example, my workspaces are set up as "C:\\dev\ws\***\" where *** is the name of the programming language, such as "CPP" (C++) or "Java". The ws folder I have there that keeps these folders just stands for "workspace" in short. After having gone through multiple OS installs over multiple systems and longer times spent trying to reach my files during dev, I've found that keeping things close to the root of the drive and having good, meaningful, and shortly-written file-keeping locations and habits are incredibly good for you and it's always good to start clean.
Ssssecond, if you have Windows 7 SP1 and up, you should go get yourself Windows Powershell (v3 or greater) for yourself
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=34595, because it's also far more capable of scripting, which rersulted in Windows getting it's very own developed package manager, Chocolatey NuGet
https://chocolatey.org/ , which can be easily installed by copy-pasting a line of code, and from there on, you're free to go wild and explore that entire library of software made available for installation through choco. So if you're going through a fresh computer or freshly installed OS, nothing beats installing every single program you need with one command line each and no nonsense. Even if you already have the programs installed, if you run the installation command through choco, it notices, and it makes it available to be upgraded through choco when possible. Which is great, especially for programs that don't have automatic updates, such as Blender, the 3d modeling software. There's also a few powershell scripts you can install to make your life easier/have more integration. Of those, my favorite is posh-git. It adds to git and makes it the best integration of git with windows in a native environment/shell.
Also, personally, I use Eclipse as my IDE for my smalltime programming, learning and development (for both Java, and C/C++, of which their are separate versions of that same IDE for) just cause it was one of the first ones I started using when I started programming out on Java, along with Netbeans, which I didn't come to like. Eclipse had a good dark theme, and just overall it's a pretty nice IDE, I have to say. Code:Blocks is also pretty great, and has quite a bit customizability, along with Visual Studio, which is I'm prrretty sure one very industry standard IDE. And with the release of the (FREEEEEE!!!!!) Community editions for VS, which is made for open source projects, personal education, learning, and small professional teams, you should have this installed. That's a very significant step up from a 90-day limited capability trials with the Express versions before you had to buy the thing, and I'm a broke programmer. Free things to me are like honey and I'm a bee. I invested alot of personal money on a big workstation/gaming computer a few years ago, sure, but, I can still use all of these tools and rather rapidly on an old repaired up toaster laptop of mine. SO. That's my contributions to this thread for awhile.
LASTLY, if you're beginning, start out small and work on the grasping and utilizing the concepts first. Java is good for beginners and picking up some concepts quickly with, sure, but there are certain things that are I feel incredibly important to work with and understand with C that aren't really available, say, in Java, such as pointers, pointer arithmetic, memory allocation, arrays of primitive data types and manipulation of arrays by the subtle difference of either reference or value, vectors, etc. And don't try to chew on big bites at once! Have a pace to it and explore the standard library you have available to you, before moving to the other stuff.
Happy programming and development!
