writing computer programs?

[Phantom-Takaya]

Interesting. The Computer Systems Engineering degree I'm working to get actually teaches subject matter regarding artificial intelligence and artificial neural networks. Of course, I personally have been using the Ada programming language to toy with the idea fo building an AI. And if anyone's curious, it's within the GNAT compiler, so it can be used in both Linux and UNIX... which explains as to why I'm looking for UNIX in a thread of mine.

[Vexx]

<spews coffee at screen> Ada!?
Gods, I remember taking courses on that at Ford-Aerospace in the early 80s (the incoming Next Best Thing). It was an early OO sort of thing with promise but so clunky that it was impossible to do anything realtime-ish or mission-critical with it. I thought it was an extinct language these days overrun by other OO languages.

I may have to go take a look... for old times sake.

[Sazelyt]

Originally Posted by guest

Hi, I am considering learning how to write computer programs. Can someone give me some suggestions on where and how to start?

Basic knowledge is usually easy to learn. First, decide on what you want to do. I guess, one of the best ways to learn programming is to work on some project big and exciting (to not get bored). You can cheat by using a template code and add functionalities on it. With each additional functionality you can increase the difficulty level, and by the end of it, you will gain sufficient experience to start writing your own code. You will still need good resources to learn programming in detail, but, even in that case, practicing is the best way to learn.

[felix]

Books in programing are not for learning they are for reference. You cannot just read a book and expect to *know* programming. It will only work if you're reading a book for the info, it will rarely work the other way round. Just put your mind to something. Read a few tutorials to master the basics and then just improve your searching/researching skills. Contrary to what you may think in programming some of the somewhat more 'interesting' stuff doesn't apply in the real world except maybe as text in books.

Starting with any of the popular languages is best. For the most part computer languages are very transparent in how they apply to a concrete product. Just digging at the surface should give you a rough idea of what you should expect of it. Although' perhaps as a total newbie they might be more opaque.. mmm. I recommend starting with the one you find friendlies and most enjoyable, try to ignore any criteria like usability etc. For what it's worth, in the begging it's best to just do something simple and all of the languages out there are capable enough. (I think in your place I would have started with Java in NetBeans, because it's somewhat easy and forgiving and should make for a somewhat fast learning curve)

Just like it has been mention so far, unless it's just as a little hobby, programing is not as exiting or rewarding as you might think at first. In any case, just master determination and you'll be fine.

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Lin-kun	"Many online tutorials seem to be written for programmers that just want to get comfortable with another language [1] (they often start with very easy examples, but thats all what is done for the beginner most of the time - programmers usually skip these parts... and beginners usually have problems to go beyond these parts). But there is another problem, often such tutorials only deal with programming and showing stuff the language is able to do, yet are not very detailed on how software design is to be done with the language. [2] So in the end, one might be able to write small blocks of code, and maybe one is able to somehow chain them, so that they somehow work with each other (or worse one will blow up blocks until maintainability and further work on it becomes almost impossible). However for decent software, good software design is very important."
	~~~~~~~~~~
	[1] Very true.. that's why something like Java is best, the language is practically written for fast learning, and since it's OO beginners shouldn't have much difficulty when scaling up their projects. I agree with you, OO programming isn't really that great as far as performance etc, but then again this really isn't something that is questioned, after all OOP is in essence good manners rather then programing. Personally, even with the extra discomfort, I'd choose OOP for most things, perhaps because I have that gardening spirit. Haha ^^ [2] Do you really need someone to teach you that. I know I may am wrong, but I like to think it's best to learn by just testing, sure so X tells you this is how it's done, so Y tells you that's how you do that.. so what! I don't ignore people but I don't fully buy into pretty words until I "see" it for myself by putting my head to work..

Seiji-san	"Both PHP [2] and Python are totally free ("open-source") languages so they cost you nothing to try out [1] ."
	~~~~~~~~~~
	[1] Ohh~ And which would be these languages that you imply actually cost you to try out?! [2] I like PHP, I wouldn't call myself an expert in it since I never attempted to do anything major with it. Some info always keep popping up about PHP tho'. Is it true, is it really full of holes.. as in less secure then other languages.

[SeijiSensei]

Originally Posted by Cats

And which would be these languages that you imply actually cost you to try out?!

At one time there were no free compilers for most mainstream languages on platforms like Windows. I guess times have changed somewhat, though I suspect the availability of the totally-free ("GPL") gcc and friends played a role here. I remember buying software like TurboPascal for Windows. When I later started building Linux boxes, I was amazed at how many free compilers/interpreters were available even with the earliest distributions from a decade ago. Some languages remain encumbered with intellectual property restrictions while some proprietary languages, like Java, have been re-released under an open-source license. There are definitely parts of .NET that are not open or else there wouldn't be a Mono project. These may be free "to try" but may or may not be "free" to redistribute. Nor can you always see what's "under-the-hood" in those runtime libraries that are required to execute programs written for these proprietary languages or development platforms.

I like PHP, I wouldn't call myself an expert in it since I never attempted to do anything major with it. Some info always keep popping up about PHP tho'. Is it true, is it really full of holes.. as in less secure then other languages.

In its earliest incarnations, PHP was insecure in that it converted variables passed through GET/POST HTTP requests into globals in a PHP script. So if your script had a URI like /index.php?myname=SeijiSensei, then a global called $myname containing the value "SeijiSensei" would become available to the script. That made it too easy for nefarious parties to inject strings into your code that could have malicious results. Nowadays that functionality is disabled by default and all the passed variables are stored in arrays. You need to extract things from those arrays (like $_REQUEST["myname"]) before you can act on them. Of course, if you just set $myname=$_REQUEST["myname"] you haven't really accomplished much which brings me to the second point.

PHP gets a lot of flak for problems that really have more to do with poor programming techniques than with the language design itself. There are many PHP applications out there that have been found to contain vulnerabilities, usually either "SQL injection" attacks or "cross-site scripting" attacks. These type of vulnerabilities occur when the programmer trusts the inputs sent to a script and fails to validate them. These subjects are way too technical to discuss here, but in neither case is the fault really in the PHP language. Some might argue that PHP is "too easy" and thus enables novice programmers to make such mistakes. On the other hand, I see lots of "buffer overflow" attacks against professionally written software from well-known companies as well.

As someone who builds database-driven web sites for a living, I find the openness of PHP a godsend. The fact that the language is relased under the General Public License has enabled an enormous collaborative effort among developers and made PHP a remarkably powerful scripting engine. It's easy to access SQL databases, crypto libraries, session-management functions, etc., etc., given the incredible array of functions PHP contains. I can build PHP applications that run on top of the Apache web server and access PostgreSQL databases secure in the knowlege that I won't ever have to worry about licensing restrictions. As an added bonus, if all these are running on a Linux server, I don't have to pay a penny for any of this software, either.

[Jinto]

Originally Posted by Cats

Actually good OOP design is not quite easy. One can ignore design patterns, use case diagrams, well structured class diagrams and such.... as a beginner. But for professional stuff I think good OOP design is a little harder (not so straight forward) like functional programming design.
Gardening spirit, hm good for the mega projects that are too dynamic to be planned in details beforehand.

Originally Posted by Cats

Yes I think that is your style

[Phantom-Takaya]

Originally Posted by Vexx

<spews coffee at screen> Ada!?
Gods, I remember taking courses on that at Ford-Aerospace in the early 80s (the incoming Next Best Thing). It was an early OO sort of thing with promise but so clunky that it was impossible to do anything realtime-ish or mission-critical with it. I thought it was an extinct language these days overrun by other OO languages.

I may have to go take a look... for old times sake.

Yes, Ada. Amazing isn't it? GNAT adopted Ada, so I'm not sure how much of the original coding was retained.

[Jinto]

And I thought languages like Prolog are preferred for AI stuff.

[Phantom-Takaya]

Yep. Most people prefer it. It's simple and easy. I just decided to take a different route and make it difficult for myself. It's like starting from scratch.

[Urahura Kisuke]

I suggest you learn C# with XNA framework.
It would help you make games, and since this is a hobby, then that would be in order, no?