This year at my Uni, we're starting a course of OpenGL. The professor gave us full freedom as to what library we use along with it and what version of OpenGL we use for our projects but the lectures will be centered around FreeGLUT and OpenGL 2.1. Could anybody more accustomed to OpenGL suggest me whether I should stick to such couple or choose something different?
I have absolutely no experience with OpenGL, if that matters. Also, as for the language I don't have any specific preferences. If I were to point one or two I like the most, I'd probably say C++ and Python. Of course I tried googling it and asking around but couldn't find anything - I just heard that FreeGLUT is quite basic and there are more convenient and more rewarding library to learn like SFML, GML and SDL. Also, apparently 2.1 is quite old version of OpenGL and the newer ones - based solely on shaders or so I've heard - are the standard which should be used...
Being quite confused on the matter, I kindly ask for your opinions. Which version should I learn if that's my start with OpenGL? What library to go with it?