Programming Advice

Category: Geeks r Us

Post 1 by Jeff (the Zone BBS remains forever my home page) on Friday, 13-Nov-2009 20:17:57

Hi I want to be a programmer and make audio games. I want to lern C++ and Jovva I'm looking into colleges now and would like some advice. What cources to take, if there were any things you had a hard time doing with Jaws, and any advice you can give me thanks.

Post 2 by wildebrew (We promised the world we'd tame it, what were we hoping for?) on Friday, 13-Nov-2009 23:07:46

Ooh, it is not as easy as it seems, word of warning.
Start by getting a Bookshare (www.bookshare.org) membership and then get a book like "teach ourself Java in 24 hours" or similar titles, if you get the membership I can look for the exact title. You probably donot want to start with c++ as in that language you have to handle pointers and garbage collection and such. It is a great language, very fast and powerful, but for 99.9% of what you'llneed to do as a programmer you can use Java or c#, vb or any .net program or Python. I think Java is a good way to get started. Download and figure out the Eclipse editor for Java, it is powerful, supported by Jaws (at least pretty well) and you can use it throughout college. For c# it is all abouve Visual Studio.net 2008, it is freeware for students with a bit limited functionality, but nothing that will bug you big time starting out.
Start small, do one hour session each day, do it twice, or three times until you understandit. Do the exercises and get the errors. It'll be painful and a bit boring and complicated but you *must* go through this period to be successful at coding in college and beyond.
Get started before college and before courses and get the hang of the programming environment, be it Eclipse or vs.net or something else, and be comfortable writing code, else you will be at extreme risk of failing classes. Programming is one of these things that requires a mind set and way of thinking, once you have it programming is not hard, but if you do not have it it is extremely stressful.

Post 3 by blindndangerous (the blind and dangerous one) on Saturday, 14-Nov-2009 0:32:34

I'm thinking of giving python a shot, just to have something to screw with, make small stuff. That, and I want to take a look at HTML 5, but that's not really a programming language at all.

Post 4 by Jeff (the Zone BBS remains forever my home page) on Saturday, 14-Nov-2009 15:54:31

Thanks I'll check out that book.

Post 5 by TylerK (This site is so "educational") on Monday, 16-Nov-2009 22:20:35

HTML 5? Never heard of it, I doubt Dreamweaver even supports it. Now, XHTML 1.0, I've heard of. And Python's awesome!

Post 6 by blindndangerous (the blind and dangerous one) on Tuesday, 17-Nov-2009 18:20:30

I heard about it from Josh lioncourt, who I'm following on twitter. He posted it a while back, I'll have to look on W3C's site, see what is new about it.