clickay. This is the graphics library I started out with. It's based on GLUT. It's not the fastest (hardly!) or the most feature-rich but it's easy to use, insanely so. Although I've since graduated to things like DDraw, I'm still rewriting my first game (for the third time) using this library. I haven't used SDL or Allegro or whatever so I can't claim experience with those but this would be a great tool for begineers... I think it might even be easy enough to teach in the first few days of a lesson for a "instant gratification" type of thing. Just throwing this into circulation since nobody seems to know about it and I think it's a great tool. Development seems to be dead but there's already a lot of content, good documentation and you'll probably find any answers to questions by browsing their forum archives.

I think I've heard of this before, but now that I've actually seen the site it looks fairly interesting. And since it's based on GL I don't have to bug them about not being able to port to Linux.:)

Yes and a nice touch is that they have a bunch of prebuilt projects for various platforms (Windows, Unix, MSVC, Dev-C++) that you can build off of. It'll definitely cut down on those "How do I set up blahblah in Dev-C++?" posts.

I used it for my first game, a video poker game for my first-year c++ class. the main reason we used it in that class was the same reason you're saying its good. I could concentrate on the game's logic and leave the library to do the graphics work. A pretty good library now that I think back on it, maybe I should explore it again.