Need help finding direction in opengl programming

dear moderator, I couldn’t figure out where to put my questions, so I decided to use this thread.

I am not new to 3D graphics programming, but I am new to OpenGL. I want to convert one of my 3D games to a program written in OpenGL and Bullet engine. I have in mind to make it portable to Linux. I will handle Bullet later. My problem is how to begin with OpenGL. There are many extension libraries. My graphics card goes up to OpenGL 4. I don’t want to spend time on latest fancy effects in the beginning. Is it OK to begin with Visual Studio 2010/Glew/OpenGL 2.1? I mentioned OpenGL 2.1 because I have many learning resources for this version. I have seen beautiful games and demos made with OpenGL 2.1 and for now that seems good enough for me.

Does that take me in right direction? Is this a good start? Is it possible to use Glew and limit coding to OpenGL 2.1?