Yup, I figured you might say that... Although I'm with you on SDL for beginners, all I am saying there is that it may be the easiest to learn, but in my case (and a few others I reckon) who have made their own libraries, its just a tad annoying to remember

high school student just learning CS
Now that is indeed good news, I will assume they know how to set up their environments, or we could write some tuts on those I suppose, because it is a pain to include into your own tuts TBH.

Although in my case, I got into game programming by C/C++ tutorials (and a book) and then picking up FreePascal and working stuff out. Ie. I learnt how to program games while learning a language and porting examples and techniques over. It only took 2 years to get where I am, and I don't regret a minute of that experience: I can read C/C++ and program games in pascal at the same time so yay.

Can't help but take extra notice of the 'tile based games' - I've just been down that road and have the scars to prove it. I walked into the scene with a faulty rendering code and buggy tileset management. All in all it took 2 days, and 58 bug solutions to get it working properly. Without performance tweaks - I doubt many beginners are going to want to go through all that. Although I could grab prometheus and have it done in say, 8 lines?