[Will]

OT a little, desdinova, I would recommend simply using your current programming experience. Take a look at a game, any game, from something as simple as tic-tac-toe up to things like pac-man or tetris, up to a game as complex as SEIV, and just think of what you would need to do to program it. That would really be the best way to learn game programming, IMHO, just doing it. If those books are the kind I think they are (a la "Tricks of the Windows Game Programming Gurus"), you should be able to pick up the graphical side. As a personal exercise (and partially as a result of boredom), I started writing out the basic data structures needed for a SEIV-like game. Almost like SEIV, except I tweaked it a little, so there's no limits on total players, ships, units, systems, etc. and it's on a coordinate system. Just doing that for a few days really helped solidify my knowledge in areas of C++ that I had only begun to learn a few weeks before (mainly, I wrote a templated double-linked list from scratch, then debugged it many many times).

So, just pick a simple game, take a little time to outline what you would need to do to make the game (ie, card game, make the deck, think of ways to code-ify the rules, etc), then start. Then just keep on increasing the complexity, you'll learn more and more each time.

(BTW, please don't ask for the code I wrote, it is vastly incomplete, and I would like to finish it as an exercise before handing it out).