I'm working on a college project and need a good 2D sprite library to get some visuals into the workings of my project. All I need is to be able to position sprites and render an elevation map as a color coded terrain. I know this is pretty simple graphics but all my background is embedded, networks and low level OS and I don't have time to learn the graphics programming right now...

SDL is a good 2d library to use, check out Lazyfoo Tutorials

**EDIT: Also very easy to use as well.

For starters I would look at SDL or SFML depending on if you are more comfortable with C or C++.

The SDL 1.2 branch has been heavily used for quite a while. It has good cross platform support and utilizes 3rd party add on libraries for things such as networking, image loading (the core only uses bitmaps) and GUI. SDL is mainly a software renderer however it can be used in conjunction with OpenGL or Direct3d to get hardware acceleration. The 1.3 branch has been a work in project for a few years and is aiming to integrate the 3d APIs into the core of SDL.

SFML is relatively new and offers many of the same features as SDL but in a C++ object oriented library. SFML also has some of the 3rd party libraries of SDL built into it such as networking and uses OpenGL for it's backend renderer allowing performance boosts over SDL in many cases.

I would recommend checking out both sites and deciding for yourself which you would be most comfortable with. In my opinion they are both similar to use so it mainly comes down to preference.

Thanks, I'll check those out.