To someone thats new to programming, has some major computer knowledge and would just appreciate complexity; do you have any suggested compilers to use?
clang is pretty awesome (or LLVM - I'm still not sure which one's doing the actual compiling, clangs page says it's a frontend to the LLVM compiler so...).
My point of view thet the MS VC++ is very bed compiler. But the problem is that now it is difficult to find a free good compiler. Maybe GCC is the preferable compiler.
clang compiles C or C++ code to the LLVM intermediate language and LLVM generates actual machine code for the target platform. However, clang still doesn't reach GCC's performance of the generated code at this time.
+1 for Clang++, especially if you can install their C++ library implementation, libc++. It is the youngest of the available compilers, written from scratch directly to the specification of the language, and it made good use of knowing what other compilers did wrong.