I'm not new to game development, or C++... but I am new to game development with C++. I've been using Multimedia Fusion 2 prior to this, and have spent about a year in college learning C++ now, so I'm hoping to ditch MMF2, and move onto some real game coding. Which libraries would you recommend I get started with?(Specifically for 2D games at this point.) We don't start using them in school until next fall, so I haven't used a library with C++ before.

A few popular ones I've heard of (but honestly know nothing about) are Allegro, OpenGL, SDL, and of course DirectX. I'd probably be more interested in something that could simplify things for me a bit to get started with, which I imagine would be none of these. Any ideas along those lines?

Well, OpenGL and DirectX are not 2D libraries, although they can certainly be used for rendering 2D if you want. They're probably not the best choice for you right now since you want to keep things as simple as possible and dont need any 3D functionality.

I would recommend SFML 2.0. It is object-oriented, has a helpful community, and itsn't that hard to setup. (There's even a guy that provides a Code::Blocks project for it so that all you have to do is put in your installation path.)

I was thinking about choosing between Allegro and SFML... and from what I've heard, SFML has built in networking capabilities, so I think I'll go with it. Don't plan on doing that right off the bat of course, but for the future, it seems like it'll be handy... so I'd say SFML it is.