For beginners...

SO: Me coming from C/C++, and could care less about Win proggin, should use GLUT? In the long run though, I should program oGL with the the win32 API… right?

glut is fine to learn OpenGL. It cuts it down to the very basics so does speed up your learning.

Chances are that at some point, your projects will get larger and more complex and glut will not offer enough flexibility. At that point learn WIN32…I wouldn’t bother until you need it