Most of the programs that you are familiar with in Unix have been ported to work in a Windows environment. Better still, they are free, and you can download and install them on your own computer if you wish. This tutorial has details on setting up a computer running Windows so that it can accept Unix shell commands like g++, emacs, and make.
CygWin
Most of the Unix commands for Windows are contained in a package called CygWin. To install this, download and run the setup file from the link above. During the installation process, you will be given a list of packages and ther chance to choose whether or not they will be installed. Make sure that make and gcc are installed. (They will be under the Development category.) You can also check your other favorite programs, such as emacs, to make sure they will be installed. In order to produce the typescript file required for some assignments, make sure you select the util-linux package under Utilities.
Emacs
You can also get emacs as a stand-alone program that will run under windows. Information on downloading WinEmacs may be found at http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/. Look for the question "Where can I get precompiled versions?" and then skip down to one of the sites that mirrors just the NT Emacs distribution. You want the latest version number, and the file with bin-i386 in the name. Once you've downloaded it, uncompress it using WinZip, or if you already have CygWin you can gunzip and then untar it using tar:
$ gunzip emacs-20.7-bin-i386.tar.gz $ tar -xvf emacs-20.7-bin-i386.tar
This will create a directory tree. Within this tree, in the bin directory, the file runemacs.exe will run the program.