Hey Slugs!
Before I ventured into the business of game development I collected quite a bit of experience with c++ from classes and from literature. This helped tremendously as I transitioned into game development, but it didn’t really sell the whole picture either. So I took up reading on game development and game design from the local library and steamed through a few books from successful game developers, both coders and managers – just to try and get a grasp of what I needed to look out for and try to minimize annoying time sinks that other people have identified and solved. So it probably took a good year before I started off working on my first serious project, although I had written and “arted” a few very minor projects that I made alongside some of the literature I read. I can give you a list of the books I read and the forums I hung around to help me out if you’d like.
You’ll run into walls and bottlenecks more often than you’d think, and having somewhere to turn to for help is a major relief. Gather some wisdom before you start off – otherwise you’ll just end up going back and redoing things over and over again as you learn more along the way.
And final note; start small. Create something and finish it, then move on. You’ll learn so many things from small projects that you can take with you as you increase your scope.