Advice for Starting Programmer

[liquidtech]

I'm starting in programming and i would like to know the opinion of people that have been in programming for some time to guide me in where i should start first. I've done a little bit of qbasic but it doesn't have much room for growth. What language would be a good starting point and have some room to grow in. I'm checking out python right now and it seems pretty straight forward but i would like to know your opinions.

 

[Descartes]

We first need to know: what are your goals? Do you want to be a professional developer? What kind of applications do you want to build (e.g. games, enterprise applications, web applications, etc.)?

 

[VicodiN]

Read, read, read, .... And do some more reading...

 

[Nothinman]

Find a good book, classes at a local college would be good too. One thing that sucks is that it's really easy to learn how to write really bad programs, good programming habits need to be learned early and I've always thought books and classes were the best path.

If you can't afford that just find some tutorials for a language around the 'net, there are tons of them. Once you get the basics of programming changing languages won't be a problem, it's basically just a change of syntax but the ideas stay the same.

 

[Juniper]

Most challenging thing in programming is the design process and to come up with a good architecture.

 

[VBboy]

Learn Visual Basic, a high-level, almost-fully object-oriented language.

Don't flame me, I am not coming back to this thread ever again

 

[VBboy]

Originally posted by: Juniper
Most challenging thing in programming is the design process and to come up with a good architecture.

I concur, my friend!

Flowcharts, pseudocode, any diagrams, etc.

 

[Nothinman]

Learn Visual Basic, a high-level, almost-fully object-oriented language.

Learn anything but Visual Basic, a poorly designed language that locks you into a single platform and vendor.

Knowing that he won't come back to argue makes it that much easier to say that =)

 

[kleinesarschloch]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Learn Visual Basic, a high-level, almost-fully object-oriented language.

Learn anything but Visual Basic, a poorly designed language that locks you into a single platform and vendor.

second that. in the end you need to decide what language(s) you want to use. C/C++ is a very good and versatile language. i have most fun programming when i'm writing an app that i will use myself (or when i get paid $$$$$$ ). book examples are good, but not a great motivation to keep programing. try to have fun and don't give up at first sign of difficulty. use the 'net, it's a great resource.