Tell me about coding

I am currently on a ICT course at college and I am heading in the gaming route. But at the moment, I am learning about computers in general.
I want to get ahead of myself by starting to learn code now, this will defiantly help me in later courses when I tackle coding with C++.
I already know fair bit on Visual basic, and I want to move onto a more advanced coding language.

I was wondering which language should I tackle and how should I approach it, bearing in mind I am going down the gaming route.

Any advice will be appreciated.

I'm assuming that you are learning the older VB6 style Visual Basic as opposed to the newer object oriented .net Visual Basic. Eventually you will need to become pretty knowledgeable in the area of OOPS (object oriented programming). C++ is an object oriented language and is used heavily in the gaming industry. VB6 is pseudo object oriented while VB.NET (part of the .net framework) is full object oriented.

I'd keep learning programming concepts using your VB and then maybe later take a JAVA class or two. If you get JAVA down, you will get OOPS down. You could, of course, download the trial version of Microsoft's Visual Studio and play around with VB.NET and C# but those .net languages are not used in gaming too much. They're more suited to large, enterprise related business applications. Plus, you can use JAVA right now to start creating games which you can actually post on a website. By the time you get to taking C++, you would probably be fully versed in OOPS. You should also take a few math courses especially if you want to get into 3D gaming where math is used pretty heavily.

VB's a good start though. VB.NET is even better. You'll probably see .NET classes in your course catalog. .NET even has it's own visual C++ language which would be helpful to learn too.

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If you want a head start, start learning C++ right away. This will give you a chance to get familiar with the syntax and the standard library.

Many people seem to think C++ is some kind of monster you need a lot of previous programming experience to learn. But I think as long as you don't expect to write 3D games by the end of the first week, it is possible to learn C++ without much (if any) previous experience.

You just have to take it slow. Your first programs will be silly and very simple. But little by little you can put together the concepts you learn to create more complex software. Beginning now you can really get a good feeling of things before they start pushing you into it, head first, in your courses.

For the most basic things you can do with online tutorials, but I would recommend just buying a book right away, as you will need one sooner or later.