I have an Academic version of Visual Studio .Net 2002 I bought via a course a few years ago. Health issues meant I dropped out of the course, but I still have the software.

So, how useful is the likes of Visual C++ 2002 in today's world? Should I just download Visual C++ Express or something and work from that?

IMO it will work fine. There are further enhancements but for a beginning you shouldn't have any problems. For the most part, at the beginner's level, C++ is C++. Just remember to use the '.h'-less version of the headers, ie iostream, not iostream.h

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