1.) Please do not double post, especially at the same time in the same forum.

2.) DirectDraw is depreciated. 2D graphics can be still be drawn using D3DX. Check out MSDN for a good starting point.

First, do you NEED directX? A very useful library for making 2d applications is SDL. I haven't gotten into it much myself, but a lot of people rave about how simple it is to get started right away without having to spend a week just learning how to initialize it.

http://www.libsdl.org/index.php

Okay, so lets say you have a reason to learn directdraw(hopefully a good one). Realize that directdraw is no longer really supported by microsoft. You can still use it, but they haven't updated in quite a long time. An old book that covered directdraw extensively was Andre LaMoth's Tricks of the Windows Game Programming Gurus. It's a huge book that goes quite indepth and since it's older I bet you can pick it up pretty cheap. Possible drawbacks: old, written in C style, and for the MSVC++6 compiler vs. a more modern compiler.

There's also of course the Microsoft given tutorials:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/archive/default.asp?url=/archive/en-us/ddraw7/directdraw7/ddtut_4vjr.asp

I strongly recommend you consider Something besides directdraw though. Even if you want to use directX for 2d, you should still use the direct graphics 3d libraries to do 2d with only a little work, also allowing you to use 3d technology to help with your 2d graphics.

That's a Good Thing because many people like to use OpenGL for 3D, and pair it up with SDL when they need 2D.