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Posts: 958 | Thanked: 483 times | Joined on May 2010
#20
the best way to start learning programming is to write something (obvious ain't it? hehehe).

if you've never done programming before, do a search around the web and figure out the core skills required for a programmer. these are things that no book can teach but will be essential in reducing the stress and pain of learning to program. a couple of things pop to mind as i type this:
a) ability to break the problem down into smaller chunks and tackle each chunk separately and then the ability to piece it back together.
b) some basic understanding of (ok these things you can read in a book hehe).
- flow control (in any language)
- variables (how to assign and use them)
- functions / procedures calls

those two above go hand-in-hand.

worry about UI the last because that is usually the most difficult part (at least for me since i suck in UI design and hate writing code to make the app idiot proof lol). just print everything out to the console / terminal.

if you do read a programming book / C++ book / python book / etc (insert your best book here for learning how to program), my advise is to never treat the book as linear progress i.e. assume that when you read it from chapter 1 till the end, you will then be good enough to write hello world. my experience is you need to jump around chapters back and forth.

set yourself a target e.g. i want to write a simple program to show hello world and accept input from the user then do some text manipulation and show the final output as my text input in reverse. something specific. then set out to write that simple app using the book as a reference / guide.

once you've got a hang of those basics you can then do platform specific development. platform specific development has nuances of the platform that can be very very frustrating for someone who has no background in programming at all. if you are starting out learning C / C++, start with stdin and stdout for input and outputs first. you ignore the entire chunk of GTK, Qt, Hildon, etc. frameworks which can be overwhelming. come back to these when you feel comfortable with C / C++.

my fav quote on programmers: "it is easier to teach a programmer how to play chess than to teach a chess player how to program."

good luck!!!

Last edited by droll; 2012-04-16 at 23:03.
 

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