I've been to Balad, Warhorse, Falcon, Stryker, Victory, Caldwell, BIAP, Tallil, Cobra (1&2, for those few who remember the original), plus Arifjan, Wolf, and Doha in Kuwait. Most of my time was spent at Warhorse, a dirt bowl with an intermittent internet connection that struggled to even support IM chat. I'm a life long PC gamer, and I spent 4 years in Iraq. When you live in a location with limited or no internet connectivity and have massive amounts of free time games are a great escape from a miserable environment. It's not an obligation of the publishers to provide games they can play, but it sure does make life a lot more comfortable. Here's the catch. I mail ordered a half dozen games from amazon (40-60$ each) and couldn't play any of them because of online DRM requirements, STEAM, and other mandatory log-ins etc. However, I could walk down the to local shops and buy a Pirate version of the game for 5$ and it worked just fine. How many times do you think I sent my money to a retailer before I figured decided it wasn't worth the effort of trying. I was an IT contractor in a combat zone so I had plenty of disposable income and I would have preferred to play the legit game. I was willing to spend the money to make it happen, but excessive DRM made the games unplayable. My issue with DRM goes beyond the deployments though. Many of my favorite games were win95-winXP. While the game can play just fine on Vista/7 the DRM isn't compatible anymore. I have books of CDs with old games I purchased, but I have to download pirate copies to play them. When excess DRM only punishes legitimate customers there is a problem in the industry.

Personally, I find VB.net a good choice for learning It's easy to use and gently teaches the fundamentals you'll use in all object oriented programming. Visual studio does most of the heavy lifting for you allowing the GUI to be drag and dropped into place. Double clicking on a button creates the event for it's click. Once you start building your app you can get into objects and events at a slow pace while focusing on the basics. It also has extremely forgiving syntax compared to many other languages. I've had to learn coding twice... 10 years ago I started coding with VB5 but ended up doing support instead of development so it had to put it away. Now, my support career has come full circle and I'm helping build the software I've been supporting this whole time. 10 years later I find myself re-learning all the basics in VB.net.