I don\'t know that C++ is the be all and end all of languages to develop games in, although it is definitely probably one of the most popular and something employers will be looking for.

If I were to go about learning how to program I\'d try and figure out the basic concepts behind programming. One way of doing that is to expose yourself to a number of different languages and types of languages.

In computer science the popular school of thought at the moment is that there is 4 programming paradigms.

Iterative programming, such as Basic, C or Pascal. The program basically follows a series of steps and does each step in order. There can be forks in the paths that the program takes.

Object Oriented programming, such as C++, Java and LPC ( I mention LPC because it is an easy language to learn and get involved in coding text based adventure games). This basically treats the program as a series of objects that pass messages between each other to tell the other components what is going on.

Functional programming languages, such as Miranda and Haskell. This treats things as a function similar to the way mathematicians write down equations. These are mostly used in mathematical modelling and the like.

Logical/declaritive programming languages, such as Prolog and Mercury. These treat programs like a logical framework. These are often used in AI research and the like.

So if you find that you like programming or want to investigate it I would recommend checking out what is out there, you might only ever use C++ in your job, but if you have played with everything that is out there it should give you more ideas on what is possible and what makes computers tick.