As a kid I wanted to be a game developer. I dodged a bullet. Finished uni and went looking for a job, a company that was absolutely shite offered me a spot as a designer on the strength of some sites I’d made but I got there and realised I was shit - spotted they didn’t have any real developers so I quickly taught myself PHP and MySQL. Got reasonably good and went somewhere else as they were paying an illegally low wage - just as the first company went bust.
I finished high school in 1996 and I knew I wanted to work with computers. Back then (with barely any internet in Argentina) you had to walk every faculty to learn about the different careers (public education is free, you don't have to apply), so I ended choosing System Engineering and the first two years were fine until the last course of the second year where I met a professor who blew my mind with formal grammar and automata theory. One thing was reading about that in a leaflet and another was being taught
I realized there I should have studied computer science (at the School of Exact and Natural Science) but I decided to stick with engineering because most computer science graduates didn't have that many job opportunities (and I didn't want to throw away those two years). As the career advanced and it moved further away from computers and nearer to humans, though, I lost interest and eventually dropped out of it.), or stick in a single place for a good number of years, which will give you narrow but deep knowledge (I'd call them specialists). I also learned that companies in expansion prefer hiring advisors thinking they will cover many positions with a single person whereas companies in trouble resort to specialists. I consider myself a specialist in VB.NET/C#, net framework and unit testing, design patterns and legacy system maintenance/migration (which I had been doing/using for over 10 years) but I'd certainly need help and a lot of googling for setting up docker or configuring Azure or AWS, things that any architect or devops can probably do in a blink. Without a degree I run the risk of obsolescence which is why I read quite a lot (at least one programming/design book per month) which has opened my mind quite a lot. I also like learning languages (I'm rather proficient in Java, both desktop and Android, plus I use Python whenever I need to write utilities). I hope to eventually learn Haskell or some other functional language.
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Any language is easy to learn starting off, but after that, some get harder than others. JavaScript and Python are pretty easy overall. I've also heard Ruby is easy, but I don't know any of it. A lot of the other more "serious" programming languages (all the C derivatives, Java, etc) are more strict and formal, and less loosy-goosy than JS and Python.Never done programming but I am interested in giving it a shot just for a hobby. What's the easiest language for a complete neophyte? (
Cheers.
I'll give JS a try.
Thanks, I'll check it out.
I'm dicking around in Python if you decide to give that a whackThanks, I'll check it out.
Great; I'm down for anything. I know nothing about JS or node JS or Python. It's all completely new to me.@Everyone
Dunno why I didn't think to offer here, but I could always slap up a server up for us to share projects or work together on shit with
Git repos, redundancy, IDEs, whatever
Got 3 older bare metal servers (1 single board, 1 dual board) I've been wanting to cluster into something
I can drop the specs if you guys want; they're some custom build cloud bull shit from like...Sun Micro
Working at a data center has its perks
I'm dicking around in Python if you decide to give that a whack
JS I'm just...so jaded towards after hearing everyone bitch about it so much
node.JS is what I would suggest over JS, which if you're down for node.JS I am too
Honestly I'm not too far off from yourself; I'm on the administrator side of things
Cheers. I'll look forward to it.
Thanks! I was wondering what book to get.
Thanks! I was wondering what book to get.
pr0cs
for the advice) and found this course (which uses Java for the examples, so I suppose I'll learn a little of that first so that I can follow along):
I'm a little late, just now read through this thread.. Anyway: Assuming a somewhat solid Python foundation, my experience is that the official docs suffice.
Hey, great to hear about this, as you mention some people usually begin way too many tutorials, or the wrong tutorials. With Python there are just too many tutorials/courses that teach you how to write sentences (with Jupyter Notebook for example) but never teach you how to write the program itself or how to structure it
And you get cross-platform support as well including Android and iOS. In fact I studied Android but decided not to pursue that route as (I think) a good web application can be as good as a native application. Flutter, React Native, Ionic, Xamarin, they are all in different stages of maturity but they share the same principle, code it once, run it everywhere (Java's launching motto). It's a matter of time until good languages and libraries are built on top of webassembly (Blazor is not there still) and then all native development will be considered obsolete (yes, I know Adobe tried with Flash, Microsoft with Silverlight, Java with their applets, etc, but this time webassembly got the standard bodies behind and doesn't conflict with the interests of the big guns except maybe Apple).
R is good for statistical analysis, so go ahead and learn that, sure. But I'd recommend more to dive into Jupyter. Not sure if you're aware of that. The Jupyter kernel can be R-based or Python-based, for example. So in that regard, Python is also an option. Jupyter is a good fit in academics in general anyway. https://jupyter.org/
This is nice to hear. Bought a udemy course from a pub that wrote an angular course I fell in love with, have his flutter tut waiting when I dig myself out of my time black hole
I haven't read it but the sample pages look interesting. It might try to cover too many languages at the same time, though, which might mean it's light on the side of explanations. Bundle usually has packs where the basic books are at the top tier so that you must pay full price in order to start learning, say, Java. Note that the book starts with scratch which I've never used but it's said to be a good starting point to get the basics learned. The fact that the pages don't look like walls of texts might make a difference, so if you can afford it I'd say try it out.I was in the book shops the other day and came across this hardcover book:
Publishers Book Site
and I am tempted. It's a little overwhelming to going to Humble Bundle's page and seeing a pile of books about programming. This seemed like a good starting point, but I wanted to hear what you guys thought of it. I am an absolute beginner when it comes to programming (HTML and Basic are as far as I got) and it would be fun to learn how to make an app, build a webpage, and prototype a game.
Nice thread.
I've been a regular on the GAF fitness thread for a few weeks now, posting weekly updates on my progress. It's been a good motivator, helping keep me on the straight and narrow, so I thought it might be good idea to do the same as I begin my coding journey. I'm currently under lockdown without a job, so have plenty of time
Coding background:
Started learning a bit of python a couple of years back in the evenings and had fun with it. I hear a lot of people complain that they get stuck in "tutorial hell", where they keep following tutorials but never get any ideas of what to actually build with their new found skills. Luckily, I got an idea for a work-related project pretty much straight away, so dived into my own little project very quickly (probably a little too early tbh!). I had to go abroad to finish off some unrelated studies, but am getting back into things now. I went through a 4 hour youtube intro to C (want to dabble in a low level language for a while), and will continue on that track by doing this course this week:
I always follow along typing my own code (and usually do a little experimenting of my own), so it isn't just a passive learning experience.
I'm also going to watch a Harvard CS lecture every day:
Somebody recommended learning about data structures in another thread (thanks D dave_d and
Anyway, just like in the fitness thread, I'll be bcak every Sunday to report on my progress and failures.
. I've used other, more modern IDEs when writing Python, but I really like the minimalist aesthetic of Vim. Any Vim users here?
Don't think so, once you start with data structures you'll learn lists and double linked lists, which are the base of the others.
The tutorial used Vim, which I actually quite enjoyed. I've been going through Stranger Things recently (one episode a day) and the basic, green text, command line style fits the 80s mood very well
Hey, I've been using vim for over 20 years by now It's hard to grasp at first but once your head clicks you can edit text very fast. I got the vim plugin for Visual Studio Code so that I can type as if it were the console.The MIT got some videos but the lists are pretty messy
Search for Computer Science in their channel, and don't forget to check Abelson and Sussman's videos there, they are quite old but also really good. Glenn Vanderburg's talks are interesting too, some of them might be somewhat advanced. Note that they use different languages once they start with the examples (LISP, Python, etc). Is there any IDE to write and test them or just any editor would do?
As a kid I used to write really basic text adventures in STOS.
