Learning Programing Languages.

If you can go to college I'd guess most community colleges would offer courses. Go to Borders or other book store and snoop in their computer section, I'd guess there are some how to books.

Maybe someone else would have better ideas - like someone that has learned programing. :laugh:

 

It would be good if you gave us an idea of how much programming exposure you have had and what you hope to achieve with programming to know what types of resources would be applicable to you.

 

One of the classes in my next block is Java Programming. I'm not sure if I am looking forward to it or not. the one I am in now (Fundamentals of Programming with Algorithms and Logic) is enough to make you want to beat your head against the wall. You have to go five miles around to cross the street (so to speak)!

Hopefully Java will be more direct.

 

SitePoint has some good books and a helpful forum. I haven't found programming extremely intuitive and I'm a math person. If you try to do some on your own, make sure you get a book that also has downloads - these can be on a CD, but many books have a site you can go to to download the files either one at a time or all at once zipped.

 

I second the SitePoint suggestion. Computer books are also good places to learn, but they are expensive. You can usually get some good ones from the library, although they may not have the most cutting edge stuff (e.g. they'll have information on C# 2.0, not C# 3.5 yet).

 

If I may....

Quite a few colleges seem to still be offering Pascal as their "introduction to programming" language. In my be-it-ever-so-humble opinion, this is a waste of time and money. Pascal isn't used for anything except introduction to programming courses, so you waste a semester or two learning a programming language that you won't use again for anything. You have to then spend another semester learning another language, when you start doing programming for real. You can learn the same principles by using a language that's actually being used in the workforce.

Look at the vocational-technical schools in your area, or 2-year community colleges, and examine their curriculum. These would be good jumping-on points for the beginning programmer.

If you're going to teach yourself, find an "idiot's guide to Java" or "Java for Dummies," and work those books until you're sure you understand each and every page, and then progress to the other books.

Trotter, programming doesn't follow mathematical principles. This can be argued by both sides, but hear me out. As my first real computer teacher told me, as he was teaching me Cobol, it's all about English. English majors make some of the best programmers, because they understand sentence structure.

 

Yeah, I figured that out. Mostly the course is on the logic used to get the results you want. It really doesn't use a lot of logic in my opinion. I could write proprams to do what we have to do on my old Tandy Color Computer 2, and do it in a third of the steps the pseudocode requires.

Yeah... that's REAL progress...

 

Logic? When the first rule of programming is, "garbage in, garbage out"?

:laugh:

Had a project out in Colorado, where I had to look through some other guy's Fortran code and convert it to C (which I was learning at the same time). He had the goofiest way of labeling his "goto" subroutines: whatever number he happened to think of at the time. He literally had a dozen different subroutines with the same label. But the program worked. I never did figure it out, and went home with headaches.