To be honest, I'm not sure the move to writing graphical apps vs console apps is really all that big of a jump
if you use a good library That of course means be able to use headers correctly an understand how the linker works. If you can cross that hurdle, you would probably be just as effective churning out simple 2D apps that hold your interest, over console apps that don't. Motivation is always a big factor that is often overlooked by the more... seasoned amongst us. Some people are also much more visual in their thought process, so having something giving immediate feedback is a big boon. This is why I think everyone ( rich ) should start their programming career with Lego Mindstorm! Apparently some courses actually do this, which is excellent.
I have no idea what language we are talking about here, but it's probably C++. In that case, 3 weeks is probably enough to get you ready to use the likes of SDL or SFML if you can get through the configuration part, that is going to be your biggest hurdle. When writing
my tutorial I actually envisioned my reader to be about 3 weeks to a month into their development. Basically having gone through an introductory book, understood the basic concepts of programming like variables, program flow, function declarations and that's about it. I think you could easily get to that stage in that timeline.
Now, going to Win32 coding and writing DirectX or OpenGL code... that's a bit of a jump for a programmer 3 weeks along in their development.
Mind you, what Telystan said
You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake.
Is exactly right.
All the intelligence in the world doesn't let you skip the learning curve. You may think this is what you are doing when you jump right in with many things at once, but you are really just deferring the learning curve to another time and making the entire process more difficult.
That said, I don't think the OP is doing that. Frankly ( and this is rather sad ), but so far as beginners to this forum goes, a 3 week investment in learning something is actually quite a bit higher. Most posters to this forum try to skip that stage completely.
