the glutLookAt bit sounds a tad precarious to me, since from what I have heard glut is quite badly deprecated. Also, I do not see why you cannot use those together... Might I propose a slightly different approach, I would recommend an approach more where you have a program that does something, perhaps in sdl, and then try to break it down and port it to OpenGl so that you understand the program and then how to do it in OpenGl. That way you don't learn a hypothetical understanding of OpenGl but a practical one solving real programming problems...

Just a thought. I am no OpenGl expert, so I can only suggest not really recommend strongly.