Just bought a really old book on C++ programming (it was only 50p). Got me thinking, since this is all aimed at Borland C++ for Windows (3.1):

a) Would I be able to compile any of my programs nicely for WinME with GCC?

b) Since it calls on a fair-few Windows libraries, are there any places on-line which do a good comparison of Windows libraries and the Linux equivalents?

Basically I have only ever used BBC Basic, QBasic, VB (see a common thread here) and I did a little on Pascal. I am trying to teach myself C++ in my spare time (in between presentations, courseworks, boring lab work with viruses, really boring lectures on viruses, etc) and would prefer to be able to run my nice 'hello-world' type programs under Linux.

well, many of the fancy / low-level libraries are different, and have different names. I guess they have different names because they work differently, and blindly beign able to cross compile ain't a good thing if the program might end up doing something didgy under a different os... i think that the unix stdio.h is called somethign different under windows, can't remember tho. It's worth tryign tho, the theory should all be there, and the genreal code should be,. id' guess, 98% similar, a fwe minor hacks would probably benefit you to find out which libs actaulyl do what...

incidentally, printf is (according to my SAMS C++ book) officially obselete now, and cout should be used instead, but on the default installation on MD80 iostream is hidden away somewhere nasty... g++/iostream.h i think. anyone got any views on this?