No offence but if you're new to programming then the API might be a bit more than you can chew, If you're starting VB from a C++ Background no problem, you didn't make it clear in your post how much programming you've done.
The most usefull tool for using the API is the API viewer which comes with VB, if you go to your add in manager (in the Addins menu) you should get a big list of things you can Add in, one of which is the VB6 API Viewer, select this and it will become an option in your addins menu, I think you have to load a file the first tiome you run it, it's WIN32API.TXT and it should be in tools, winapi.
it's fairly intuitive and it does your api declarations for you.