A little help?

Hi, I am a novice programmer wishing to learn more about the trade. I recently heard the best application to make graphics from scratch is DirectDraw. Can anyone tell me how to actually access DirectDraw. Do I need to download it or is it already in my computer. And if it is in my computer where do i acess it?

Thanks you to anyone who may enlighten me on this.

This article seemed to be the most coherent...

http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article608.asp

Hope it helps,

I'd also check out SDL (http://www.libsdl.org). It's a bit simpler IMHO, and DirectDraw is quite outdated (it "died" with DirectX 7).

Some tutorials and resources. (http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Programming/Games/Libraries/SDL/)

shmoove