So will you only cover Xcode and Visual Studio?
No, I intend to add coverage for Code::Blocks and potentially KDevelop at a later point -- unfortunately, I'm sitting on a Satellite internet connection until mid-April, so I'm holding off on installing a Linux partition on any of my machines.
Also, do you plan to release these as a book eventually?
As a hard-copy, not likely. Jonathan Harbour had run into problems with Nintendo when he had tried publishing a book on homebrew development for the Gameboy Advance system, and I know I'll have less luck with a book on developing fan games. If the response to this series is positive enough, I may consider doing so in the future.
Reading PDFs in web browsers are annoying, I would prefer just reading it on a website.
Unfortunately, I feel that discussion boards are ill-suited for formatting tutorials. Normally I had posted tutorials on my blog, but since dropping my Linode and pointing my domain to Tumblr, that's not as nice an option at the moment. With the new system for ZFGC, we're planning to add enhanced support for all resource types, including tutorials - and I plan to port the tutorials to that article system as well.
I also notice you're using SDL for window creation. I myself consider SDL to be bloated for just for that purpose, I would rather use something like GLFW. Does this mean you're going to be using SDL_image for texture loading?
I'm going to be honest, I'd never even heard of GLFW (though it certainly seems to be a decent library). Usually, I prefer to implement the application layer myself (I've got a bit of a Direct3D background, so Win32 is no stranger to me - though I'm not as familiar with Cocoa or X), but SDL provides a lot of things that were appealing to me in the context of this series:
1) It's easy for new developers to wrap their minds around. This is probably the most important thing to me, as new developers are my target audience.
2) Although I don't use it for most personal projects anymore (Horus being the exception, but that engine's largely focused on being a testing ground for things before they go into GL-Zelda), I do have some familiarity with SDL.
3) Most importantly, SDL provides a uniform method for handling a large subset of tasks - loading images, loading/playing audio, etc. Looking over GLFW, it's deprecated its texture loading features, and similarly has no support for audio. Unfortunately, covering the setup of DevIL (my image library of choice) and other libraries in a cross-platform manner is a little cumbersome for new developers.
SDL may have feature bloat, but it isn't so bad as to cause any problems. Its uniformity with API calls and ease of adding plugins (Such as, yes, SDL_image) ultimately won out as the best choice for teaching new developers.