[Miranda65M]

If you dont have full control on your source code, and you dont have any knowledge about delivering a software to final product and choosing a crappy IDE to do this delivering job for you, well forget about being code master. First you have to learn basics like build your GUI from scratch and learn how GUI logic works, how layout managers handles components etc, how software is delievered to target platform? After you learn those stuffs then you can use "wizards", "gui designers" to increase your productivity.

Suggesting people to switch their whole working environment to Linux and telling them to begin with coding GUIs from scratch and learning programming theory is a great and very motivating way to get started on the subject – you should write a book mate. Laughing
On a serious note, do not listen to this guy – stay on Windows and take small steps. C# and PHP are good languages to get started with, plus it’s perfectly okay to use an IDE like Visual Studio to help you with GUI creation until you feel confident to build your own.

If you learn the most dry of things first it will scare you off from programming in no time, there’s a reason why people start with easier programming languages and don’t learn C or Assembly first – although I’m sure our “codemaster” would recommend doing that.