You don't have to learn win32; you can replace all of that shit with a more platform-neutral alternative like SDL, FLTK, wxWidgets or GLUT and make life easier on yourself.

Initializing OpenGL with SDL is like ten or fifteen lines of code, and you get endian-independence and HID input out of it as well.

I don't know of a single person, regardless of whether they knew C/C++ or not, who thought learning Win32 came easy. C/C++ are somewhat easy to pick up because they are procedural unless you add steps to make them not be (such as Object Orienting, etc), whereas Win32 hides a lot of the steps, so people tend to think of how they went from the main function all of the sudden to handling a mouse press in a callback. Everything in the Win32 libraries can be replicated with pure C (structurally speaking, not what they actually accomplish, such as multimedia), but as Ravuya stated, you don't need to learn it. And honestly, it's not worth worrying about what others think about what technology you're using. Someone who says somethings a nuub or whatever probably doesn't have the experience in development to actually make such an assumption.

You shouldn't drop a choice because people might think less of you; I promise you that the people that matter won't. Win32 is far from being the best thing out their. If you're trying to make a game, use one of Ravuya's suggestions. If you're trying to make an application, use something that is more suited for it like C# and Forms.

Win32 is an ugly beast even if you have a great understanding of C++.

Edit: What Nytegard said.

Hell, the only thing I've used Win32 for after like 10 OpenGL games is writing a simple key-logging application. Win32 under C++ is dying out, thankfully, and good riddance -- it was like the 1988 Macintosh Toolbox without the speed of ROM.

In my opinion, I wouldn't bother learning it. You don't need it, and people who would insult you for not knowing Win32 have a very small world (and apparently too much free time).

Grab what works and build a damn game with it. There's too much of this "I want to do it the hard way" bravado bullshit on GDNet.

It's part of the reason why I recommend Python instead of C++ to newbies; you don't need industrial strength tools to learn how to build a game. You can move there just fine, but it's hard to build a game if you're wrestling with C++'s intricacies the entire way. The important parts of learning to make a game are the game guts (game loop, AI, pathfinding, collision detection, physics, level formats, rendering tricks) themselves -- which are completely independent from syntax and APIs.

I thought OGL Superbible used glut for the majority of the book. ??

In any case, the important stuff from the book (for the most part) is NOT the win32 stuff, but the OpenGL stuff. You can download the win32 framework from Nehe to take care of all of that stuff if you don't want to deal with it.

You may never have to use Win32 directly in the real world (depends on what you do), but it is still helpful to be familiar with it. Even the .NET Windows.Forms is built on it and you will more fully understand how it works if you know win32.