So I hope this would be the right area of the forum I am posting in seeing that it is beginners and I am trying to get information just a mindset on where I should start first in programming. I'm a young guy 20 years and I work with networks in a datacenter with HP. But my dream has always been to be a game programmer. I know very little with programming just a few things here and there the basic hello world program that's about it. I will be starting school in about a month going towards my computer programming degree. But in the meantime on my own time where should I really start and learn the very basic to really get me going??

Hi there, in my opinion, you should work on a starting idea for a game, sort of like a rough draft. I've been working on my first game for a couple of months, learning as I go along and as long as you have the desire to keep working at it, you'll make progress.

I would recommend to learn C#. It's a very powerful programming language and if you know it you can use XNA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_XNA). To get started you can read the basics tutorials here and the watch the XNA tutorials here. (Torque X is made for XNA: http://www.garagegames.com/products/torque-x).

There are also some very powerful game-making tools which require little programming, like Unity 3D (NFS: World was made with it) and UDK (uses Unreal Engine 3). Unity has a free version and UDK is free for personal use or free games. If you are going to ask money for your games you must pay a $99 fee and redirect a percent of the revenue to Epic Games. I really recommend to take a look at them.

I started some years ago with ALLEGRO/SDL and c++, both lib are very intuitive, do some small games, something that you can achieve. and if you get frustated (you probably will, like we all did xD) keep trying.

SDL Tutorials -> http://lazyfoo.net/SDL_tutorials/index.php
Allegro TUtorials -> http://www.loomsoft.net/resources/alltut/alltut_index.htm

good luck