Moving out of C++

[dmoore210]

I've began coding a while ago and am going through a C++ book, as well as some tutorials and am reaching the end of the lessons. Although I've noticed throughout all of C++, you are stuck in the console throughout the entire book and tutorials. I originally came into this wanting to do Windows programs, using graphics and such. Nothing beyond simple 2d graphics though.

Which direction should I go? I am thinking about picking up some Visual C++ material but it seems there is MUCH more about Visual C#. Is C# better than visual C++? What about all the other visual languages. Which one would be the best direction to go into?

[helios]

throughout all of C++, you are stuck in the console

What are you talking about? You are barely finishing some of the introduction material. You can't possibly know all the language has to offer after a couple of months. There's a lot of stuff in C++ many books and tutorials don't cover, such as what libraries to use for what.
It's true. If you use just C++ then doing things like graphics it's not easy. It's not impossible, but it's not easy. And it certainly won't be portable. That's why libraries were invented.
For just about anything, there's always at least two libraries that do what you need.
GUI? There's GTK+, wxWidgets, Qt.
CUI? ncurses, PDcurses, system calls.
Graphics (for games and such)? OpenGL (Mesa 3D, to be more exact), Direct3D, although only for Windows; Allegro; SDL; OGRE (OGRE is actually a rendering engine, but close enough).
Sound? OpenAL, SDL_mixer, DirectSound.
I could go on, but I think I made my point.

There's no such language as Visual C++. VC++ is the name of the compiler and IDE written by Microsoft. The IDE happens to have a GUI designer that performs all the cumbersome declarations for creating windows, and such.

I myself wouldn't recommend C# or any of the .NET languages, what with being closed systems and all.
It's design doesn't exactly lack merit. It does lack performance and originality (Sun beat Microsoft to the whole bytecode thing by a few years. And there probably were other languages I don't know about that were compiled to bytecode and precede Jave, too).