Why not the latest version? By the time your done learning C++, you'll be on VS 2016 anyway.
By the way, Visual Studio is free - you don't have to get it from Dream Spark. The "Express" edition of Visual Studio is fully-featured and completely unhindered, even for commercial software.
The limitations of Visual C++ Express 2012 are: (from wikipedia)
- No resource editor.
- No built-in MFC support.
- No built-in ATL support.
- No profiling support.
- No support for OpenMP.
- No support for add-ins or IDE macros.
- No option for crash dump generation (Debug->Save Dump As).
6 out of 7 you probably won't use for the first two years of your programming anyway. 5 out of 7 you might not use for the first five years of programming. Some you might never use. The Express version is perfectly fine for most needs.