I second Visual Studio, since it has a decent debugger (light years ahead of GDB when it comes to usability) and is relatively user-friendly (almost everything

I second Visual Studio, since it has a decent debugger (light years ahead of GDB when it comes to usability) and is relatively user-friendly (almost everything is customizable, but there are sane default values). I recommend starting a blank C++ console project and adding files as you go, otherwise you risk getting confused (e.g. "what the hell is stdafx.h and why is it included by default in my main file") and trapped by Microsoft's ecosystem. > What about build tools? It's hard enough for Java newbies to wrap their heads around Maven or Gradle. You don't have to worry, Visual Studio has everything integrated. There is a build system (MSBuild? last time I checked) that you could theoretically use outside of Visual Studio, but you probably don't even need to be aware of its existance. Also, if you do Android development, Visual Studio abstracts Gradle away, which is basically the way development is supposed to be done.