Hmm, I already answered some of these questions in
this topic, however, I rewrote it a bit for your questions:
1)C++ or VB.Net (and many others) are a programming languages: it's a set of rules that describe how to write something meaningful, how to communicate with the computer and tell it what it should do. It's similar to English for example, you have grammar and vocabulary, that defines the rules of communication. In this case, you communicate with the computer using the programming language, you tell computer what to do: perform various operations, draw stuff on the screen, communicate over network, generate sound, perform some operations with files... a lot of stuff. You use the programming language to describe how to do these things.
However, computer doesn't understand this language directly. Instead, there is a program called compiler, which understands the programming language too. It will read what you wrote and "convert" it to a machine code - set of numeric codes, that the computer understands - it's basically some program that you can execute (run) and that will do things, that you told it to, using the language.
You're certainly using many programs: your own operating system, web browser, games, text editors: everything you use on your computer was created using programming languages and you can use the language to create your own programs.
Programming language like C++ or VB.Net makes it easier to create programs, because you don't need to know these numeric codes that computer understands. Instead you need to know just the language which is a lot simpler and the compiler program will generate these codes for you (you don't even need to know about them, you'll get a program that you can run as the result).
C++ is also general purpose, meaning that you can create all kinds of programs in it (this also answers part of question 2 I think) from simple tools, over complex applications or games or even device drivers and operating systems.
There are however some specialized languages, that might for example allow only some mathematical tasks, but you can't create a game with them for example. Programmers often know several programming languages and use the most suitable one for given task.
2)Technically to use most languages you need just some text editor (for example notepad, but not Word or Writer with formatted text (fonts, colors and that sort of stuff)!) and a compiler (you need to download compiler for a specific language). You use the text editor to write the code according to the rules of the C++/VB.Net/anything-else language (these rules you need to learn) and then give it to the compiler tool, which will create a program from it.
In case of interpreted languages, you don't need to compile them, you just give the source to some interpreter and it will perform the instructions you wrote.
However, it's way better to use some development environment called IDE, which basically does the same, but handles a lots of tasks for you and provides various tools to make the programming simpler, faster and less error prone. For example, Microsoft provides IDE's both for C++ and VB.Net and also C# (and some others) for free: Look for Visual Studio Express 2010.
3) You can either search for some ebooks or online tutorials, there's a lot of them: simply type "<language name> tutorial" in the search engine (Google for example) and I'm sure you'll find something. Of course, replace the "<language name>" wit hname of the actual language.
4)They do if you want to create your own hacking tool: you can create it using the programming language and make it interact with the game in the way you want. This however will most probably require some assembler knowledge from you (which is probably one of the hardest to learn), as you need to analyze the workings of the game, so you can tamper with them.
5)This is a very difficult question. Firstly, it's matter of individual perception, one person might find one language easier than the other one does. Additionally, there exist very simple education languages, that are very easy to learn, but are basically useless for practical purpose. So considering practical usage, you might try VB.Net which is very popular (even here, so it might be the best choice) and it's simpler, because it's derived from old language BASIC, which was made so people can learn programming easily, or (Object) Pascal (one of its dialects is known also as Delphi), which was also created for education purposes, but it got very popular even in practical usage. Another interesting tool is Python, which will force you to write a good formated code.
6)Ebook stands for electronic-book. It's simply some book, that you can read on the screen of your computer, PDA, smartphone or even special device for ebooks like Kindle. Ebook is just a computer file, so you can carry a whole library with you even in your smartphone, because they're simply stored in the memory.
Some of the ebooks are paid, some of them can be downloaded for free. You'll find a lot of ebooks for download in this section of the forums:
http://www.hackcommunity.com/Forum-Electronic-Library