PurpleYouko wrote:I found OpenGL 1.1 to be very easy to learn compared with DX9
In both cases the versions are very old and do not require a graphics card in order to work properly
On trying to learn newer versions of OpenGL I came across massive amounts of conflicting advice about which headers to use and to be quite honest I threw in the towel after wasting the best part of an entire week trying to get any kind of 3.0 to work at all. All the tutorials just tell you that the files should already be on your computer. Well they aren't on any of my computers and I couldn't find a single reliable source for any of the configurations that were discussed.
In short it is a severe pain in the ass trying to configure OpenGL at anything beyond 1.1
Later versions of DirectX are easy to compile provided you don't try doing it in codeblocks. The SDK seems to be incompatible with MingW so you have to use Visual Studio or something with the microsoft compiler.
DX is a lot harder to get the hang of but in the long run I think it's the better choice since there are no 3rd party software headers to contend with.
That's because your work computer doesn't support newer OpenGL versions!
If you want to learn OpenGL, which certainly isn't something you want to start learning right away, go for OpenGL 3.0+.
And as PurpleYouko said, the files are not on your computer, but I could even setup a tutorial on setting up an environment to work with the latest OpenGL versions (and older).
Also I advice you to stay away from Code::Blocks as this dev environment supports writing BAD code, as all warnings and most error detections are turned off by default!!!
I once turned them all on and I got several thousands of warnings when compiling.
So you should get started with visual studio or QT Creator. Even NetBeans is a good dev environment with very wide C++11 support, it's a bit complicated though.
Visual studio is definitely the easiest to get into and to get started with.