C++

[Forsaken]

I disagree -- with Java, you get a series of drawbacks that often leave one questioning the applicability of it. For instance, object creation is rather expensive in the JVM. You more often find that Java is fragile performance-wise to bad programming patterns.

Thus JIT compilers.

[Rob]

Leaving the topic of crappy interpreted languages that can't do enums properly for a moment;

This is a popular c++ compiler for windows;
http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en...pp-express

this website contains documentation on all the standard c and c++ libraries;
http://cplusplus.com/
and also a nice beginners tutorial;
http://cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/

i can surgest this book for beginning c++ programming;
http://www.amazon.com/Sams-Teach-Yoursel...b_title_bk
and i hear good things about this one aswell;
http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-C-Throug...b_title_bk