:P Question

[Corruption]

Hi few questions on programming if somebody would take the time to awnsere :D (dont blame you if you avoid this post)

Im just wondering how some of you started? im terrible at maths and im wondering if thats going to stop me from learning. Alot of it inolves some hardcore maths right? i've tried learning C and nothing ever happened with that :S

Thanks

Corruption

[nullArray]

I started by buying a "Learn C++ in 2 weeks" book, reading it then entering a programming contest in high school (I was promptly trounced and eliminated). Later I went to college for it..., and only had to take one semester of actual programming. Now I take classes on algorithms and whatnot.

Hardcore math?

Depends on what you want to program. I think you'll find that you won't be starting GUIs and most likely be working in a console/terminal for the majority of your first programs. Terminal programs are kinda disheartening for a beginner, it feels like you'll never be able to play with the big guns. To this day, I haven't written program/algorithm that required anything beyond basic high school algebra.

[Corruption]

well so far i've written like really really basic code like

I.E

#include <iostream>

using namespace std;
int main ()
{
int thisisanumber;


cout <<"Enter a number: ";
cin>> thisisanumber;
cin.ignore ();
  cout<<"You entered:"<<thisisanumber<<"\n";
  cin.get();
}

Eventualy i would like to be writing useful programs that would solve any problems i come into lol such as "well i wonder what would happen if i created an X.Y.Z" (i like the whole open source community lol) but like i said im really new at this and still a bit confused..and it kind of bores me sitting reading what each function does it just seems like il never be able to program anything when what i do program is simple and i need to go over it to make sure its right

Sorry for the MASSIVE amount of text

:P

[Zimmer]

My Story:

Warning May born you to death procede with caution

You have been Warn

Well it all happened Christmas Day (2007) with my Uncle and me watching George Carlin. We watched a couple of his routines on youtube then forgot about it. Well the next me and my Uncle were at my Grandma's house and with no internet but want to watch George Carlin (It was a laptop I got that Christmas), so my Uncle and me tried to find the cache with explorer but soon he decided DOS would be better so we opened up CMD (Yes I know it is exactly DOS) and he taught me all about the commands and cd, dir, etc. Then I was searching for some tutorials to learn more and came upon something mysterious called BATCH scripting read a little about it then forgot about it and watched Live Free or Die Hard (using VLC) and fell asleep. Then a couple of months later I got an iPod and wanted to copy Live Free or Die Hard onto my iPod and so I set out to try and find how to do it with VLC I got it down finally and ripped following a guide at the VLC wiki. Well it did not sync and so I tried to convert it with iTunes and it was going way to slow so I set out to find what went wrong I looked at the guide I then found a youtube video to set the height and width throught the VLC preferences. I then converted Live Free or Die Hard to the proper setting and put it on my iPod. Later I wanted to again rip DVD to my iPod but it was a TV Show and 14 disk total (2 Seasons) (Yes I owned them and if you want to know the DVD were a show called Numbers from CBS) so I wanted to this more automated then Live Free or Die Hard so went to the VLC wiki Guide and tried the batch file the author had posted it didn't work so I created my own by learning batch files by using youtube. So I read up on all the information on the vlc command prompt and searched for how to set the height and width, and the converting options and dvd playback as well as setting titles, etc. I then created a batch file and ripped the disk over an afternoon. While watching either the show or Hak5 (I was behind and so learned about the swithblade, I searched for it download it and then after Symantec said it was a virus promptly deleted it). Then I created more and more batch files and read the Hak5 forums and tried to learn C and C++ then tried python and the rest is history (ok maybe not.).

BTW for a language to learn I would suggest python. Also you don't need to be a math wiz.

[H@L0_F00]

I'm learning C but I first started in Visual BASIC '08 with some step by step book (forgot the name) and then I just quit after about a month. I started C this month. You shouldn't plan on making anything too big or versatile for a while. Good programmers have been doing it since forever lol you might wanna start out with Visual Studio to get used to it

[SomethingToChatWith]

Yeah doing VS 2008 programming in VB right now. Had some mIRC scripting under my belt but actually creating programs can be a different story for sure.

VS not matter the language well be good for you. You got intellisense to help you.

Don't worry about memorizing all the functions. There is just no way you can do that, and a waste if you do because you won't remember all of it later. Think of an idea for an application you could use and than apply what you need to do after looking through help on the specific topic if you don't know how to procceed.

I am a few routines away from creating my first useful application. This was done through hours of practice and occasional research, not by reading the entire library of help docs.

[SigmaStrain]

I started my endeavor into coding by reading a "teach yourself C++ in 21 days" book and doing the practice assignments at the end of the chapter. I then proceeded to learn a lot of different programming languages the summer of my junior year in highschool (perl, python, LISP, Ruby, Forth, Visual Basic, C#, Java, and a few others I can't remember...)

Right now I mostly use C++, perl, and assembler. I also mess with Verilog (not a programming language i know) and I do a little shell scripting.

For me, the key was READING. Make sure you read and also try to apply whatever you learn because it'll stick better that way.

[stingwray]

Simply put, not being good a maths won't stop you programming. It will however limit your ability to understand the maths involved with computers which will prevent you from being a good programmer.

The maths isn't hard, some discrete maths, mathematical methods and statistics is all you really need. Also I would steer clear of anything financial or graphics based if you can't do maths.

As for what language to learn, learn the one that is best suited to what you want to program. All of them are pretty much the same and once you know one well you can pick up others pretty damn quickly. What will speed up your programming ability then is learning some decent libraries and frameworks for that language and then you should be able to speed.

[Corruption]

Thanks for the help all, do you need to be running a webserver to use python? because i got the impression you do

[SigmaStrain]

Thanks for the help all, do you need to be running a webserver to use python? because i got the impression you do

Nope. I just used a python interpreter.

You can find tuutorials and download the interpreter here:

http://www.python.org/

hope this helps =)

[Corruption]

I was thinking of PHP lol and it does help :)

if their all the same, then why people use different languages?

and whats the difference between the languages..sorry i have googled and wikipedia'd but it doesnt give anything that in-dePTH

[stingwray]

I was thinking of PHP lol and it does help :)

if their all the same, then why people use different languages?

and whats the difference between the languages..sorry i have googled and wikipedia'd but it doesnt give anything that in-dePTH

There not all the same, however they do fall into a limited number of buckets, mainly imperative programming and functional programming. They all keep the same sort of design and make the same sort of things available to programmers. The difference is in syntax and libraries available for them, then what they are specialised for. For example if I want to write an application to run across Linux, Windows and OS X then I'm likely to look favorable at Java, as this is one of its core abilities. If I want to write a 3D graphics program, then Java is probably not going to be the best idea, because of limited low level control and general slowness in some areas, so I'll look at C++.

Basically you have to choose the best tool for the job. But put bluntly, I've learned something like 12+ languages in less than 2.5 years, covering functional, imperative and logic programming, by far the hardest was the first. Learning a syntax is easy and comes with practice, learning how to solve a problem which I give to you in english, that is the difficult part of programming.

[Corruption]

Thank you for all your help on this however im wondering what the difference is between what id be able to program in say C+ or Java than what id be able to do in python im still unsure of what python does :P and i know that sounds newbish but everybody has to start somewere (i've been on wikipedia..and its not great at giving examples)

Cheers

Corruption

[Jonnycake]

You can program the same things, they're just different syntaxes. Also, Python is interpreted so it is inherently slower than C++ or any other compile language (for at least the first run since you can create a .pyc file which has Python bytecode which is much like what Java does (except with Java you have to "compile" to run)). In Python, you can also write your own extensions in C++ and probably ASM too (if you need to lol). Python's just really good for a beginner since it gives you the basics of programming, etc. You can also compile it so that the python interpreter is right in the application so that it can be run on anyone's machine that's the same OS as yours (not sure if it works cross-platform, might just be Windows - haven't looked into it all that much for Linux so they might not have a release for it (yet)). You can't do that with Java - the user has to have a Java VM installed in order for them to run it. Of course, most people have one installed anyway.

Anyway, as for C++, you don't really have to read what all of the functions do. When I learned C, I didn't really read anything, I just played around lol. Just depends on how much time you have on your hands and how you learn best.

For math, you really don't need to have a strong math background, I'm in middle school and I'm still an average-good programmer so you obviously don't need a lot of math. Although, you do need some depending on what you're making (i.e. if you're making a 3-D engine you obviously need strong math background with vectors, etc. but if you're just writing a program to print "Hello world" (actual python syntax btw :P), you don't need any math :P).

[Corruption]

I started programming in python following a tutorial - but its all about car mileage and shit i dont understand lol

but some of it has been useful (as far as some of it has sunk in) and jonny your a legend.

[Corruption]

is there another way to run python code than from command line so that i can program when command line is disabled

[Sparda]

is there another way to run python code than from command line so that i can program when command line is disabled

Linux or Windows?

On Linux you could create a application link on the desktop or one of the panels. On Windows you could create a shortcut.

[Jonnycake]

I assume he means windows since you don't really hear about a lot of linux computers having the shell disabled xD. On windows, you can use IDLE (a python IDE which I believe comes with Python now - although it might just be an installation option and it might not be installed now) or you can just run Python.exe without going to the command line which I think is what Sparda was saying.