Thank you, this is great advice. I know I need to start small and progress slowly so your recommendations are great places for me to begin and improve.
I like all sorts of games, but I wanted to start with something 2D. I was thinking a puzzle game to start, which could expose me to some of the event-like structure of programming a game without the complexity of the physics engine (for now). I could recreate a game like Tetris, for example, but that doesn't really seem very interesting to me.
I have thought about 'modding' a SNES game or downloading an open source gaming project to poke around and understand how the code / architecture works, rather than starting from scratch myself. I generally learn much faster this way, and would love to find someone willing to help me with this approach.
Does that help?