[ryanpepper]

When I was taught C++ at University, we were just told to download Quincy which bundles a (pretty old) version of GCC with a text editor on Windows.

Once we had the basics down they introduced Linux, the command line interface to GCC, etc.

[AstralStorm]

Formerly, djgpp package. And the equivalent Windows IDE, can't remember its name but it shipped with Mingw.