Sorry. I'm not familiar with the current books on the market. I learned it many years ago and no longer have the books I learned from. All I have left is a reference or two which wouldn't be good as teaching tools. I'd just go to Borders and start poking around.
No. Not Really. Object oreinted stuff is simple compared to manually managing memory and trying to optimize and strike a balance between speed of execution and memory use. If you want to learn the profession and actually understand how to do high performance and mission critical systems you are going to need to learn the details. You can start off fairly quickly doing object oriented work with modern languages and dig yourself deep into a hole. Most of the modern tools have incorporated the technical details and abstracted them so that "programmers" dont need to be be concerned with them - and often dont know them. And by the way, in some cases even the overhead of C++ is a problem - yes, all though nifty time saving object structures must be laid out in memory - and in these cases you can not always use C++. use the tool that matches the problem and project goal - the latter is really what drives the implementation language choice.
No, please go for C++, i am sure you will benifit more. Forget VB.Net For Others i recommand VB.Net, it is best of the best
As usual, this type of thread is starting to become a bit like asking someone to help you picking a trading strategy. "Use MACD". "MACD is no good, use stochastics!". "Your kidding right". "Everyone uses the 20mov, so use that." etc.
Why not do both? ~Scientist P.S: By the way, the last time I used basic was on the Commodore 64. Are people still using it? I thought it was so lame, I had to learn assembler to create something interesting / resource-efficient. Haven't used assembler since the C64, either. Anything after that was pretty much just Comal, C++, Java, HTML... The most useful languages IMHO. Peace.
You're bloody suicidal, but if that's what you want, email this guy. He's very friendly. In fact, download his OS and run it, the source is there, and studying it would be the best way to learn. But I'd still learn Python, I'm a zealot who cannot be persuaded. ;-)