Other Want To Start Learning Some Basic Programming?

[LazyGamerJc 30]

If your looking for a good place to learn some programming and are willing to invest some money into it. Go to http://www.ed2go.com/classes/ and find the programming section. Then voila. For more info on it and a story from me about how it actually works, read below.

So back when the guys made Liberty, I helped them with some debugging and I thought to myself, wouldnt it be great if I was helpful towards the actual programming side of things. And I started to look into programming and got into Objective C since I had gotten a brand new MacBook Air and I could make iPhone apps. I learned alot of stuff and was ready to make an app, but I couldnt think of an idea and soon enough that whole project drifted away. So I got on xbox chaos for the first time in a long time a few months back and saw Liberty and how could everything was going for it and decided to look into C# classes. Well since my school didnt offer any I started looking into online tutorials. I soon found out that this is NOT the way to go. Actual classes is what you need, not stupid youtube tutorials.

So first of all, to do this, you need a little bit of dedication. You cant just up and decide, Im gonna learn C#/C++ today. Its a long term thing. Which really chapped my ass at first once I realized how hard it was to truly and honestly understand C# without looking at tutorials for everything, but now that Im not a complete dumbass, I understand lol.

So on topic for this post, I found this website http://www.ed2go.com/classes/ . On that website is many different types of classes, but what interested me the most and what will most likely interest you the most, is the programming section. On the left side, navigate to "Technology">"Computer Programming". From here you can find many different classes starting at beginner classes, then going to intermediate classes. The classes come out twice a week, for 6 weeks and the class is 139$ USD.

Today, I finished my C# course. Let me tell you, reading all the lessons, and taking my own notes, ect, WAS BORING AS HELL. The whole beginner class was kind of boring actually. The whole 6 weeks, your working with command prompt based programs that have no gui. When I first started the course, I thought to myself, this is gonna suck. And I thought I might have wasted my money. Soon enough I realized, starting programming in notepad, or some other equivalent text editor, and compiling it with no IDE, was in fact the best way to learn. Learning like this teaches you so much more than if you start with Visual Studio because Visual Studio does LOADS of stuff for you. This honestly teaches you things.

So I just thought I would share that with yall. Hope you have some success with the classes, because Ik I have!

[AMD 885]

So first of all, to do this, you need a little bit of dedication. You cant just up and decide, Im gonna learn C#/C++ today. Its a long term thing. Which really chapped my ass at first once I realized how hard it was to truly and honestly understand C# without looking at tutorials for everything, but now that Im not a complete dumbass, I understand lol.

^ This.

The thing about learning how to program is that it isn't really something you can pick up in a day, a month, or even a year. Sure, you might be able to memorize all of the different keywords that a programming language has and tell everyone that you "know" a language, but that's only a very small part of the deal. You need to learn how to use those features in order to make programs that do something useful. For example, anyone can pick up a paintbrush and put a bunch of squiggly lines on a canvas and say they know how to paint. However, it takes a very long time of learning and experimenting to understand how to combine those colors and strokes to produce a work of art.

If you want to become a programmer, then, you need to dedicate yourself to it. This doesn't mean you should sit in front of your computer 24/7 and do nothing but write code, but you need to actually write programs in order to learn how to make them. Simply doing your assignments for school won't get you very far, even if you get an A+ on all of them (grades don't even matter in my opinion). By writing programs on your own or with a team and then reflecting back on them, you gain valuable experience and learn about what works well and what doesn't. A lot of the time I find myself finishing a program and then saying things like "wow, the way that I did this part of it sucks" even though I thought the design was a good idea at the time. But that's a good thing - it means I learned something and won't make the same mistake in the future. If you mean to tell me that your programming course will teach you how to best structure the code for a save editor, you are very mistaken. Experience, however, will. Liberty's HCEX backend was actually very different in structure from its Reach backend simply because I had discovered better ways of doing certain things.

Also, related to this second quote:

The whole 6 weeks, your working with command prompt based programs that have no gui. When I first started the course, I thought to myself, this is gonna suck. And I thought I might have wasted my money. Soon enough I realized, starting programming in notepad, or some other equivalent text editor, and compiling it with no IDE, was in fact the best way to learn. Learning like this teaches you so much more than if you start with Visual Studio because Visual Studio does LOADS of stuff for you. This honestly teaches you things.

I both agree and disagree with this. I agree in the sense that VS does do a lot for you and leads to a lot of noob "web browser" programs (especially with its whole GUI builder and WebBrowser control crap), but at the same time this can make programming more fun for beginners since they can immediately make graphically-appealing programs without needing to understand how everything works under the hood (try making a GUI-based app in C++ using only the native API and you'll see what I mean; it's complicated). A language that I actually think would be great for beginners is Python. Not only does its simple syntax enforce proper style (most of the time), but it provides a large amount of features and libraries that are easy for beginners to understand without doing too much for you. It also has an interactive interpreter that allows you to experiment with different features before you use them in a program. If you want to use VS, though, then that's fine as long as you don't expect it to make your program for you (like a lot of kids on 7s tend to do).

[ZenithRaptor 44]

I am learning programming from the person who has posted above ^.

And I have much much much much much much much much more to learn.

+ I bet it will take me months to learn the basics lol.

[LazyGamerJc 30]

^ This.

The thing about learning how to program is that it isn't really something you can pick up in a day, a month, or even a year. Sure, you might be able to memorize all of the different keywords that a programming language has and tell everyone that you "know" a language, but that's only a very small part of the deal. You need to learn how to use those features in order to make programs that do something useful. For example, anyone can pick up a paintbrush and put a bunch of squiggly lines on a canvas and say they know how to paint. However, it takes a very long time of learning and experimenting to understand how to combine those colors and strokes to produce a work of art.

If you want to become a programmer, then, you need to dedicate yourself to it. This doesn't mean you should sit in front of your computer 24/7 and do nothing but write code, but you need to actually write programs in order to learn how to make them. Simply doing your assignments for school won't get you very far, even if you get an A+ on all of them (grades don't even matter in my opinion). By writing programs on your own or with a team and then reflecting back on them, you gain valuable experience and learn about what works well and what doesn't. A lot of the time I find myself finishing a program and then saying things like "wow, the way that I did this part of it sucks" even though I thought the design was a good idea at the time. But that's a good thing - it means I learned something and won't make the same mistake in the future. If you mean to tell me that your programming course will teach you how to best structure the code for a save editor, you are very mistaken. Experience, however, will. Liberty's HCEX backend was actually very different in structure from its Reach backend simply because I had discovered better ways of doing certain things.

Well said Aaron.

I both agree and disagree with this. I agree in the sense that VS does do a lot for you and leads to a lot of noob "web browser" programs (especially with its whole GUI builder and WebBrowser control crap), but at the same time this can make programming more fun for beginners since they can immediately make graphically-appealing programs without needing to understand how everything works under the hood (try making a GUI-based app in C++ using only the native API and you'll see what I mean; it's complicated).

I agree with you partly. Visual Studio does make programming more fun for beginners because they can jump right into it. However, for someone wanting to learn programming, I think its better to learn all of the under the hood stuff. I mean, theres no point in making a graphically-appealing program unless you know how to make the program work. I know this from experience of trying to make a program and making it look nice then when it came down to the actual programming, I had no idea where to go from there because I immediately jumped into the UI thinking the rest would be just as easy.

Personally, if I was a proffesor/teacher/instructer, I would teach the graphics side of programming, and the under the hood, back end stuff seperatly while doing the basics, and once the basics of both sides are covered, then I would implement both sides into making nice, proffesional looking applications, that have nice functions/abilities, doesnt crash constantly, ect.

[AMD 885]

I agree with you partly. Visual Studio does make programming more fun for beginners because they can jump right into it. However, for someone wanting to learn programming, I think its better to learn all of the under the hood stuff. I mean, theres no point in making a graphically-appealing program unless you know how to make the program work. I know this from experience of trying to make a program and making it look nice then when it came down to the actual programming, I had no idea where to go from there because I immediately jumped into the UI thinking the rest would be just as easy.

Personally, if I was a proffesor/teacher/instructer, I would teach the graphics side of programming, and the under the hood, back end stuff seperatly while doing the basics, and once the basics of both sides are covered, then I would implement both sides into making nice, proffesional looking applications, that have nice functions/abilities, doesnt crash constantly, ect.

One of my biggest "golden rules" of starting a new project is to make the backend first before you start to work on the final UI. Of course, you might need to throw together a quick Windows Forms UI in order to be able to test it, but you shouldn't spend much time on it until everything is working behind-the-scenes.

For example, this was what Liberty's UI looked like while I was writing the backend:

But there also has to be a place where you draw the line between under-the-hood and GUI builder tools. Because if you wanted to learn how things work under-the-hood, you should be learning assembly.

[Guest Gamecheat]

Learn Assembly first

Then everything else

>

[ozzycow54 17]

Learn Assembly first

Then everything else

>

I. HATE. ASSEMBLY.