How did you start out a programmer? Advice for a beginner?

Next year I am taking Programming 1 and Programming 2 for my sophomore year.

These are the descriptions I took directly from my course outline book:

Programming 1
Prerequisite: Computer Basics or Teacher Recommendation
Description: This course introduces students to the concepts and skills necessary to develop computer software. These skills include sequential planning, flowcharts, problem solving, and critical thinking. The course uses the Basic (Basic with a capital B) programming language. Note: It is highly recommended that students successfully complete complete Geometry before enrolling in this course (I'm in Honors Algebra 2 ).

Programming 2
Prerequisite: Programming 1 and Teacher Recommendation
Description: This course continues the study of concept skills introduced in Programming 1. Students will study the principles of object-oriented programming and design to create customized computer programs using Microsoft's Visual Basic programming language.


So are those good classes?

 

Thanks for being so polite about it. I was halfway expecting all sorts of flames and bad rep.

But the hardware's still there. And the programmer still has to deal with it.

C# and Java, really, manage this neat little trick by putting things on a virtual machine. (I'm sure C# purists will throw a fit about this, because it's not quite true, but it's close). Java byte code and IL are the same on any bit of hardware, but it's still good to have a grasp on how real hardware works if you ever have to dig into the details of the byte code your compiler has spit out.

I've only dealt with Haskell and Prolog at the basic tutorial level. Those tutorials all went into what's really going on underneath the hood, the call stack and data structures being built in memory, etc.

C# is the language you mentioned with which I'm most familiar. Sure, it's possible to program in C# without having a clue how the hardware works. I have a few buddies like that. But just try to explain concepts like multi-generational garbage collection or the difference between reference and value types to them. They're just scratching the surface of what they should know.

Script Kiddies was definitely too harsh a term. I did mention that I was going into full-blown hacker geek mode (by which I meant to imply that I was abandoning my already-limited social skills). I'm in the middle of reading Cryptonomicon, and that probably made me that much more offensive about people who never bother to understand the details behind what they're doing.

I recently had a similar conversation with a co-worker about a book he noticed on my desk: Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming (vol III). In his opinion, having a grasp on how algorithms work is pointless these days, since those are all built into the libraries of pretty much every library for any programming language anyone might ever want to use.

I disagree vehemently with him. Knowing what the code is doing behind the scenes is at least as important as having at least a basic grasp of how hardware does its stuff. It's important to know how things work. This guy, BTW, writes the most ridiculous code I've ever seen. He always takes an extra 4 or 5 steps to do anything. He's very fond of catching exceptions and returning an error code which he then ignores. He's pretty much the other extreme of what I was talking about here: he learned C, so he understands pointers and such, but he's never learned anything more than the absolutely bare minimum since then.

Programmers who don't keep learning new things are at least as bad as the ones who never bother learning what they're really doing in the first place. If you don't like learning new things, then this is the wrong business to be in.

Not too long back, I had to break down and look at the IL for one of my classes to find out how iterators work. If I hadn't already been familiar with some type of assembly language, I'd have been completely lost.

I'm not saying that someone has to be an expert at IL to program in C#. But everyone who calls himself a programmer needs to have at least a basic grasp on pointers. Familiarity with how stacks, data structures, etc ad infinitum work are other things that spring to mind.

I suppose a lisp programmer does not absolutely have to have a clue about the hardware. Interestingly enough, they generally do. I think smart programmers switch to lisp after they've gotten fed up with all the nonsense that gets shoved down their throats by other languages. Which means they've already learned these things.

This reminds me of a thread I followed on comp.lang.lisp about a year ago (no, I'm not going to dig it up). The general consensus (IMO) was that any college which is not teaching either lisp or C (preferably both) is not teaching computer science.

Until the hardware bites you. For example:

When a C# program running on a toaster (powered by Windows Mobile) comes to a screeching halt because it's allocating and deleting a bazillion little one-byte objects every second, someone needs to find whoever programmed that and start talking to him about memory, the heap, and garbage collection. That conversation's going to be a lot simpler if the programmer's familiar with pointers.

Working with a fairly high-level language (called VO, in case anyone's interested...it's probably a smidge further from the hardware than either java or C#) a few years back, my team ran across an issue where our server was coming to a screaming halt every so often. The fact that I was familiar with the way file systems work let me quickly discover that the issue revolved around having way too many files in a particular directory.

Working on a POS system in VB, our team had to implement routines for putting stuff out on the display. Because I was familiar with ASCII, what strings really are, and how serial ports work, I was able to figure out this this display wasn't showing the text we sent because VB's default print method adds a CRLF to the end of the string, but the display only wanted the CR (or some such...this was a long time ago).

At that same job (so still VB), I actually got into an argument with a co-worker about how we were looking up stuff that came to us in a file (fairly small file, lots of look-ups). He absolutely refused to believe that it's faster to cache the whole thing in memory rather than opening the file each time we needed to look something up and search through the file. Well, he didn't believe until I showed him.

Some friends of mine recently implemented an IM/chat system using web services and C#. They wound up with a really horrible implementation because they had to deal with firewalls and don't understand how sockets work.

I was on a team once where we had a bunch of wireless devices talking to a single server. At one particular client, the server would lock up, pretty much at random. The guy behind that code spent a lot of time analyzing the output from a packet sniffer. We finally figured out that they had one particular machine that ran roughly once a week that would sometimes cause enough interference to make packets disappear in mid-stream. He spent a weekend shuffling the communications scheme from TCP to UDP, and the problem went away.

Most "programmers" to whom I tell that story don't understand it at all, because they don't have a clue what UDP is, and all they know about TCP is that it has something to do with the internet.

It's perfectly possible to make a living as a programmer without having the vaguest idea how hardware or algorithms work. But you'll never be really respected, as a programmer, by the ones who do. (There are all sorts of other things that belong on that list, of course). No matter what language you use, situations always arise where you need someone who really understands what you're really doing.

 

You can develop VB.NET applications using the Visual Studio Express IDE.

This is one of the vast joys of being a programmer. The people who generate programming languages and tools really like buzzwords. Visual Basic is one of those buzzwords.

When people say "Visual Basic," I usually think of Visual Basic 6 (aka VB Classic). It's the last "real" incarnation of Visual Basic. It's a very high level language, with a lot of developers who really love it, and a very powerful RAD environment. I had a friend, years back, who very much loved developing in VB. I think he summed it up very well, though: "As long as I can just drag & drop, it's the best programming environment ever. If I have to write one single line of code, it's time to switch to a different language." (I'm sure the VB classic fans will disagree, but that was my experience as well).

VB.NET was sort of the successor to classic VB. The languages look similar, but they're really vastly different. Personally, I don't think VB.NET is anywhere near as high level/powerful as classic VB. I've talked with many VB programmers who are really upset about VB.NET.

I'm not positive about VBScript. The way I understand it, it's this language that superficially resembles classic VB, but is even higher level. I think it's used in places like Excel, for those times you need just a little extra power to do something that Microsoft didn't build in.

Java is another one of those buzzwords I mentioned. I'm far from being a Java expert, so take this with a grain of salt. I think of Java SE 6 as the basic language/platform. I'm going to guess that Java 3D and Java Game programming are probably the titles of books about doing specific things using the Java language. Although there is a Java 3D library ("library" is a term which basically means a bunch of related stuff bundled together to hopefully make your life easier) for drawing 3D graphics, and I'm sure that there's a Java Game library.

Javascript really has no relationship to Java at all. Well, the syntax is vaguely similar. Java's a full-fledged programming language for doing anything. You can also do pretty much anything with Javascript, but it's really for programming stuff in a web browser. It was one of the original ways to make a web page dynamic, so the page could change without having to go back to the server and get a new copy of the page (think back to the days when everybody was using really slow modems, so absolutely every web page took forever to load, or so it seemed). These days, Javascript can also communicate with the server, behind the scenes.

If you're going to be doing web stuff, you'll pretty much eventually have to learn at least the basics of javascript. I've talked to a few people who advocate learning it as your first language. It's a very simple, minimalist, high-level language, which means you generally have to do everything yourself (although the available libraries are getting much better). But it's also easy to learn, and exposes you to the basic programming concepts.

One of the down-sides to javascript is that pretty much every web browser does things differently. So you wind up having to do a lot of things 2 or 3 different ways (once for IE, another for FireFox, and then again for Safari).

Still, considering where you are today, you could do a lot worse than learning JavaScript.

All of it. Everything should be learned. If you're going to be a great programmer (and, really, why would you want to be a mediocre anything), you should realize that you're going to spend the rest of your life learning stuff. Your skills will become obsolete just about as fast as you can learn them. There's also tons of old obsolete things that are very much worth knowing.

I love this little essay: Teach yourself programming in 10 years.

But I think what you really meant to ask was "What should I learn first?"

Learn how to use Google. It is the best programming tool ever. No matter what language or platform you're dealing with, Google is Your Friend. (I have a buddy who made that into a sign and taped it up on the wall outside his cube, because he got tired of co-workers asking him stupid questions). Seems like I've mentioned this somewhere before.

Get familiar with IRC...most languages have a channel going constantly where you can drop in, ask questions, or just follow along and watch what the "experts" have to say. Check out usenet. I think there's probably a group for every programming language ever. Spend a lot of time reading existing messages and threads (especially the FAQ!) before you post, or you're liable to get a lot of angry answers (though it doesn't seem to be as bad as it used to). You can also usually find mailing lists. Some of these things are more useful/helpful/friendly than others, generally varying by language.

As far as languages go, like I said above, javascript might be a really good place to start, based on what you want to do. I always advocate python as a first programming language. It's easy, about as powerful as PHP and perl, and it encourages good programming practices more than those other two. The fact that the community is extremely helpful and friendly is icing on the cake.

I'd personally hang on to that gift card for a bit. Pick a language (any language...it really doesn't matter) and google for "that language for beginning programmers". You should find a ton of tutorials to get you started (if you don't, pick another language).

 

Those sound like fine classes. If you spend the time between now and then learning how to program in any language, they should be easy A's.

 

A lot of your examples for knowing how the hardware work sounds more like how the operating system works to me! Knowledge of how the garbage collector works or about reference vs value types is nice, but it is by no means critical I'd say.

By all means a knowledge of algorithms and data structures etc is important, but then you need to know if you've got a O(n^2) on your hands even if you are in javascript, let alone machine code.

 

The first course sounds exactly like the sort of thing I'd recommend. This looks like you wont be doing that much programming initially, but from the sounds of it you will be learning some of the important concepts behind all programming. Basic wont let you write the next Doom or Half Life or something, but it is a good choice to get started and will teach you a lot of the basics.

Course 2 may or may not be good! OO programming is quite a big field to cover and this doesn't go into much detail in describing it so who knows!

 

Actually, that's very close to being true. But, really, how many great programmers do you know who don't know what RAM is, the difference between a floppy and hard disk, and that their case is not the CPU?

Do we have anyone on here who considers him/herself a great (or, really, even an "above average") programmer (whatever that means), and doesn't know those things? I'd love to discuss that.

 

Ok thanks for all the info. Your posts are so detailed and elongated I can't understand if I should start with C as a first language or Visual Basic.

I think I should learn PHP as a first. I am familiar with the fundamentals of that language, but I am not able to write a script.

By the way, those 2 classes are both half semester. So it only takes 1 year to finish them both.

 

Hmm. I never talked about how I got started. It seems like it was pretty similar to MattD's experience.

My dad needed to get a computer for some of the stuff he was doing at work. This was way back when computers were rare, and actually buying any sort of software was prohibitively expensive.

It took about a year to actually get approval to buy the computer, and all the nonsense that goes along with it. We had some deal at school where they regularly passed out catalogs of kids' books for the parents to buy, presumably in an effort to get those stupid kids to read.

I was a total geek back then, so I perused those catalogs like a fiend. Dad was buying a computer, I ran across some book about programming computers, and Mom said "OK." So I wound up with an introductory book about programming in basic. I pretty much memorized that book (I wonder what's happened to it).

6 or 9 months after that, we actually got the computer. I worked out this set of lies with the principal's office: I was helping Dad with problems he was having with his new computer. They ate it up. (I actually did wind up writing a few programs for him, that he probably never used, but I learned a lot). I used to get excused from class so I could pass him coded messages (things like "I just remembered we're having a special day today, so you can come pick me up early").

I was maybe 9 or 10 at the time.

Then Dad left, I discovered girls, and forgot about computers for a bit.

My senior year of high school, I got a chance to take a year of programming classes that sound similar to the ones you're heading towards. We didn't get anywhere near touching stuff like OOP, but it was a good refresher.

Started college, some war broke out, and I decided it was my duty to go "fight for my country." (Most of the men in my family have been in the military). The war was over before I finished boot camp, but I was stuck. So I spent 4 years realizing that I really have the wrong personality to be in the military.

But, hey, the computer game industry was exploding at the time, that sounded like a lot of fun, and I (sort of) had a background in programming. So I decided to embark on a career as a game programmer.

I got some beginner's book about learning C and C++ (another book lost in the mist of history). And I took a couple of local college night classes about programming, where I learned about memory, hardware, blah blah blah, and Pascal (along with Nassi-Schneiderman diagrams).

Then my submarine went underwater, and I spent some time really learning how to program, along with things that are important to the Navy like fighting fires, analyzing water chemistry, and that you're really going to die, along with all your friends (and, incidentally, most of civilization), if your sub ever actually launches its missiles.

Then I got out of the Navy and, through a long string of misadventures, wound up in a tech support job in BFE, Oklahoma. I spent about a year doing that, and I realized that it was a completely dead-end job. I'd learned a lot at that point. I spent a lot of time doing things like studying assembly language and Michael Abrash. But all my programming was still happening after work, in my spare time. (Which wound up costing me several girlfriends, which isn't really relevant, but I feel obligated to reveal for the sake of Full Disclosure).

So (for a lot reasons) I picked a tech center that was fairly near and moved to Dallas. It wasn't huge, but it was a lot cheaper than Silicon Valley, and, hey, Id was nearby. At that point, John Carmack was my hero. (In a lot of ways, he still is).

I got another tech support job there, spent about 6 months doing that, and then my manager pointed out to the manager of the programming team that I'd spent most of the time there fixing their bugs. I'd get a complaint from a customer, dig through the source code, and then shoot an email saying "We have this bug. Here's what the source code looks like. If you change the source code to look like this, the problem will go away.

And that's how I got transferred into the programming department. For some reason, it seems that managers are reluctant to hire someone without a degree in a related field. I never got around to actually finishing a degree. It seems like a complete waste of time in the computer industry. But there are still people who feel like it's an important thing.

I'm sure they have a valid point. But I've been too busy learning things that are relevant (especially since the internet became mainstream) to find the time to get one. Although I'm sure I'd have a blast having the excuse to go back to the college parties which are pretty much mandatory.

Anyway, I got the programming job, and now (several years later) I'm working at a company that's pushing over the hump from start-up to something that's really viable in the market place. I got sick of working of working for big IT-centric companies. They just don't do anything that interests me.

So, now, with all this shared and admitted: I really do strongly advise against starting out with either C or VB. Admittedly, I said earlier that the language you start with doesn't really matter much. But those 2 raise red flags for me.

With C, you're stepping into a really hefty learning curve. Yes, you will learn a lot. And you really should learn those things. But, IMHO, you'd be better off learning the basic principles first. Learn the details (and C is pretty much all about the details) later. To paraphrase an earlier analogy: start with a language that lets you work with the engine, the transmission, the drive shaft, and the differential until you understand those. Then move to a language that deals with the pistons, rings, clutch, gears, etc.

Visual Basic raises a completely different red flag. Which version do you learn? 6 is nice and easy, but it's dead. VB.NET is similar enough that you could segue over to it, or maybe just start learning it from scratch. But there's a *ton* of extra stuff to learn when you're dealing with any sort of .NET language. You don't have to, but it's there, so why not start out with something simpler?

I very strongly encourage you to focus on one of three other languages right now:
1) javascript (probably your best bet)
2) PHP (hey, you say you're already grasping the basics, so why not?)
3) Python (because I can never, under any circumstances, say enough good things about this language. If you don't know it yet, you're missing out).

C, Java, VB.NET...those are things you should learn eventually. Along with ML, Prolog, Fortran, Lisp, etc. Each one of those languages will teach you to think in new and different ways. But you really are better off starting with a language that's not going to blow every fuse in your head because there's so much new stuff to learn.

Then again, I also stand by what I said [more or less] initially. Pick a language, look up a tutorial on google, and start hacking. The rest of it's just us old fogey's saying "Hey, I think it'd be easier if y'all started learning 'bout transmissions before y'all started talkin' 'bout drive shafts." Dig in, get your hands dirty, and start doing.

 

Hi

Visit w3schools.com

Good site for beginer

Thanks

 

Honestly, I am not quite sure what jimrthy recommends or is going to recommend since I didn't read any of his posts (and I don't plan too). I was going to respond to the first half of his response to my post, but his posts are so long, and I have a life and stuff so....anyway. Just kidding jimrthy

I would go with Visual Basic. Granted, VB is a very slow and limited language (all of it .NET, Studio, 6 etc,..platform wise) it will help you along with all of the basic programming syntax and logic that you'll need to develop later on. If you want to build a GUI up fairly quickly and feel a sense of accomplishment then VB is for you.

C is a faaar more extensive language and can pretty much work on any platform. It's a great language all around even down to the hardware capabilities.

And to reply to jimrthy calling me a script kiddie, just because I do not care for the hardware aspects, memory, etc,.. as I do for actual coding it does not make one a script kiddie. It's not too bright to assume things over the internet. My first language was ASM ( a low level language). We did not spend too much time on it, so I never knew enough to be comfortable with it, which is why I never listed it as a language I 'know'. Although you don't really 'know' a language considering all of the new things you have to pick up as time goes by.

 

Ok, I am about to buy a book from my gift card, because I have had it for like 3 months.

These are my choices (so far):

Visual Basic (Although I am taking a class on this next year)
Javascript
Python (I had a lot of recommendations from many people, including a few friends that this is a good beginner language)

Once I read up on those, I will learn PHP and HTML more fluently.

 

You can get a lot of programming videos online some for free, and a bunch via torrents (eh).

VB - learnvisualstudio.net
php/C++ - 3dbuzz.com

 

hi

also try http://www.daniweb.com/

thanks

 

Ok, I guess I will be learning Python first, then Javascript, then Visual Basic.

Thanks!

 

Ratman, if you're trying to learn in the order of upward "language difficulty" then it'd probably be VB first, then JavaScript and finally Python. However, I honestly recommend you choose the language you want to program in. Not C, not VB, not whatever anyone else says. If you want to learn PHP first, go for it! Most languages (especially PHP) are well documented, have plenty of examples, and have plenty of people who can help you if you have questions (unless you're trying to learn a language like BrainFuck) and generally they all take a similar level of determination to become good at it. They all have the basic "fundamental" programming logic as they are all programming languages. If you find yourself having difficulty with the language you want to learn and want to take a few steps back, then I'd suggest a more "simpler" language (but like I said, they all require a similar level of upward learning). There's really no standard way of learning how to program like there is with say learning mathematics (i.e. basics first, then algebra, trig, calc). It's like choosing a language to speak in: do you want to speak in English? Spanish? German? French? etc. They all have a similar learning curve and you will certainly learn programming logic from any you choose, I guarantee it.

 

What do you mean by upward learning?

So are you saying Python is the hardest in upward learning or VB?

 

Just remember one thing.

Web programmers are a dime a dozen.

If you really want to make good money programming as a career, you should focus on Database Programming. learn all about all of the different DBMS, and the various types of SQL they run on. Learn about MS SQL Server, Oracle, Sybase, DB2, etc. Learn how to write complex queries to do things like trend analysis and forcasting based on dataset. Learn about the various ETL tools, like Informatica and DTS nad how to extract, transform and load from one platform to another.

SQL is a programming language, as well, it's just that it's based on 'set theory' instead of being a procedureal language like C++, java, or PHP.

This, my friend, is where the money is at.

 

Upward learning is what you're trying to do, which is learning a bunch of languages before getting to the language you want to learn. I think Python is more like Perl, Ruby and even PHP, which is in my opinion, more difficult than Visual Basic or JavaScript. It also requires you to code in a certain manner that "emphasizes" readability, so you have to learn someone else's coding style to use it. In many ways, it just seems so redundant to try and become familiar with all these languages, it's not necessary at all unless you actually want to learn them.

I think the real question you should be asking is what programming languages are best for what you want to do, not what languages are the best to start with. Every programmer has a purpose for programming, why did you decide to become a programmer and what kinds of programming do you want to do?

That's probably true
But perhaps he isn't in it for money or a career (yet). I started programming just because I wanted to create my own applications... I can't remember why but it was interesting to me then.

 

Yeah, I'm a professional Data Warehouse Programmer for a fortune 100 company, yet my passion is truly Web Development.