I don't know where else to post this question, so please bare with me.
My goal is to be able to create small games on my own at home, during spare time between work and family duties. I am not able to take any kind of normal course in a college or university due to time constraints (I'm employed full time), so I figured that my best chance would be to structure my own education by learning from a series of books. These books, however, are not in particular about game programming. They are just about programming, and here is where I'm a little doubtful that I'm on the right track. What I am learning from these books (let's take Accelerated C++ as an example), will it be useful for me to solve game-related problems if I try to create a game? Or am I learning things that I'll never need?
For instance, if say I want to create a game using Unreal, or maybe Unity, or some other engine/development tool... Unreal3 uses some kind of other language for it's scripts. In fact they have a visual scripting tool they call Kismet for that (I've created some custom maps for UT3 using Unreal3). How would learning to program in C++ help me create a game in Unreal, or Unity (which again has it's own language)? Should I stop what I'm doing and start learning these tools instead? And not just Unreal, of course, but display and sound libraries like SDL or DirectX or OpenGL?
My goal is to be able to create small games on my own at home, during spare time between work and family duties. I am not able to take any kind of normal course in a college or university due to time constraints (I'm employed full time), so I figured that my best chance would be to structure my own education by learning from a series of books. These books, however, are not in particular about game programming. They are just about programming, and here is where I'm a little doubtful that I'm on the right track. What I am learning from these books (let's take Accelerated C++ as an example), will it be useful for me to solve game-related problems if I try to create a game? Or am I learning things that I'll never need?
For instance, if say I want to create a game using Unreal, or maybe Unity, or some other engine/development tool... Unreal3 uses some kind of other language for it's scripts. In fact they have a visual scripting tool they call Kismet for that (I've created some custom maps for UT3 using Unreal3). How would learning to program in C++ help me create a game in Unreal, or Unity (which again has it's own language)? Should I stop what I'm doing and start learning these tools instead? And not just Unreal, of course, but display and sound libraries like SDL or DirectX or OpenGL?