The trick is if you really have a passion for programming and really want to learn it, you need to find your own pace you're comfortable with.Quote:
Originally Posted by Monolith
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The trick is if you really have a passion for programming and really want to learn it, you need to find your own pace you're comfortable with.Quote:
Originally Posted by Monolith
I learned how to program while drinking a lot of coffee and eating a lot of junk food- nearing fat- then working outside and losing some weight- giving the brain a rest- then remembering I want to be a computer geek and learning again.
i started writing batch scripts to construct the interpolating polynomial for a series of integers back then when i was 13. Then i moved on to writing Java GUIs to complete the same task.
Afterwards i started my own maple private server when i was 14, wrote some NPCs scripts in javascript then when on to code maple using Java.
When i was 15, i got my first experience of C\C++ via Robotics. I was programming the Lego RCX using NQC, the Lego NXT using NXC, and the VEX using RobotC. I also programmed the NXT using Java. I won two competitions using these languages :D It was then that my Java improved by leaps and bounds.
When i was 16 i picked up C# and wrote many Windows Forms applications and my school even used some of them. Because i spent a lot of time in C#, C# became my best language. I also took up Python as it was more platform independant when it comes to form applications. At the same time, i heard of Project Euler and started picking up Pari/GP to solve math problems there.
That pretty sums up my programming journey till now. I spend most of my time googling how to implement certain stuffs in my code and the rest of my time debugging, i seldom read programming books though :D
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Yeah, I wanted to learn programming because of interpolating polynomial for a series of integers too.. <.< ................. >.>
Nah but really, I've always considered myself a relatively creative person. I didn't touch programming until some code was needed for this Flash project I was working on. My teacher in high school tried to show me how to write some code, and tried to get me to understand it but that didn't work. All I's saws was Chinese- and I don't know any form of Chinese so it was pretty hard to understand.
At the point I needed to code in order to get something working, I learned it very quickly. First I copied it very quickly, then I modified it very quickly, then it gave an error that nobody could figure out, and it happened randomly at compile-time about 1/10 tests. Then I started over and got better and better at trying to understand what it is the computer is attempting to do with my written code. And if you ask me, that's the most important thing to learn how to predict when learning how to program- What is the computer going to do with your written code?
Really? What algorithm did you come out with for the polynomials? Mine was related to factorials :P
Very true, we often expect shit to be found in our code during compile time that we usually think about what errors might pop up rather than what to do after it succeeds. Oh.. that very little orgasm you get when you finally complete a project with no compile time errors :D
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for my mistake i learned PHP and MySQL when i was 16, cuz i was very impressed by all the dynamic websites outside the net. timebomb's first post here explains why this was a mistake haha. at this time a friend gave me a printed 20 page documentation that was pretty easy to understand.
well i even tried many other things like batch setup scripts, inno setup scripts, html, css by learning tuts in the internet by myself.
later i learned the basics of C in school by writing structograms and coding these programs like calculators in consoles, minesweeper in console, any singing console program that uses your speaker lol. structograms are very annoying and for luck not possible to use in huge OOP projects (who spends that time lols), but hell i understood the basics of coding (no matter which language it is).
i even learned to calculate in binary, octal, hex systems and learned logical algorithm, gatter buildings. all those basics to understand logical algorithms in any case, this helps to to think and follow your programs way u build to success.
later i learned alittle ant (ouh java xml ._.), alittle perl, and finally totaly c# + MSSQL + asp.net + js at work, now i stay on them ofc (very strong system if u take the time to learn it right).
im even learning java at school, but its a flop cuz we are put together with upcoming merchants and hardware computer scientists.
It all started when I was 13. My computer studies teacher was teaching us a programming language for beginners called QBASIC. I was fascinated by what she was teaching us, so I started learning some languages on my own.
I went on to learn HTML and CSS. Everything was going great, so I went on to learn PHP and SQL. I started by looking at how people coded their own projects, then starting coding my own.
Now that i'm 14, I can code HTML, CSS, QBASIC, PHP, SQL and working on C#.
I wanted a website when I was younger so I downloaded a HTML template and eddited with notepad haha. The beginning ;p
im far from being a great coder. very far. but i started but reading html tuts on w3schools and went through there tuts and writing there examples over and over and changing them up to my own and practicing then i got better at html and started working with php in my html. i looked up php tuts and examples on the ways of php and what certain things means and started writing out codes and rewriting them till i started remembering the stuff i needed to. (im still trying to figure out php all the way lol) but anyway my point is practice makes perfect :P
I've advanced slowly over the years, but I can say I grasp the basics of programming and can work together with a language rather quickly, although I've been slacking for over a year now, which means I'm very, very rusty. If I recall correctly, I started when I was 14 (Almost 20), with HTML and CSS. Things were doing great, I grasped that stuff easily but didn't do much about it since I lacked motivation and ideas. Then, I started getting interested in Habbo hotel, since I met alot of great friends there, and evolved my knowledge of VB6 and actually managed to make the second most sucessfull portuguese-based hotel of my prime time (06-07). Overall quit it, dedicated to my studies and gaming.. then came back because FlyFF servers were starting to emerge. I had a group of around 6 friends, all of whom didn't have any prior programming experience, but we were really eager to try out private servers.. so I started studying PHP to create the tools we needed it. I loved it, simply loved it, although now I understand its lack of professional quality (even tho I still use it!). Then, I just let my mind flow.. I took online classes of Python, which only cleared me around the basics of the language, I played with Java, C#, Ruby (On Rails), Perl .. and I think that's about it.
I can say that the biggest challenge so far has been my lack of ideas and motivation. "What can I create? What for will it be used?" That's really my biggest question. But my advice is:reverse engineering. Not the kind of reverse engineering to which you have to mess around with alot of ASM, debuggers, etc.. lets call it copy engineering. You look for an application or random source codes (sourceforge is a great resource) and you create a copy of it, after studying what it does.
Ofcourse, I still haven't achieved my biggest goal, which is to create my own server files of any game I've played/play in my gaming years so far.. but that will come with time.
I'm relatively beginner too, and I've lost motivation to continue several times. I actually started by messing around with the programming function on the calculator I used for my calculus course in High School. It was irritating sometimes, as I was a freshman in my highest level of math class at the high school, and so I'd have a lot of free-time in class, as I had basically taught myself integration, integrals, optimization, the rules.. etc. I messed around with the programming application, mostly so I could create programs to help me cheat on tests.
I expanded this knowledge to quickly pick up the syntax for C++ which is basically a building block to learning proper programming. I almost started on vBasic, which would have quickly put an end to my programming career (in my opinion) as I think vBasic is absolutely absurd and teachs utterly terrible programming style. I learned through tutorials, self-testing, friends, reverse engineering and eventually, common classes found at my local college.
I'm working on C++, Ruby, LUA and ASM. It's baby steps, but I'm conquering what I need to be conquering.
Self learnt.
I was always curious about how webpages were made. Then I did some research and discovered the "View Source" button. Soon I started changing code, trying code out myself etc. I was having fun. Then I wanted to master html and css. So I just went to a site and started learning.
Once I was on the verge of giving up. I owe it to my friend to inspire and motivate me to learn further and beat him someday.
I was first introduced to HTML programming when I was around maybe 10. When I was 10 I always wondered how websites were made and then a family friend showed me. He opened Notepad and typed HTML header, even since then I have been pretty much playing with HTML & CSS. So I've known HTML & CSS around maybe 6 years, at least, and it being an easy language and nothing you would call a strict language, it was easy to catch on.
In the past 2 - 3 years, I've been through a range of languages like PHP and Visual Basic and some other languages. I've only just gotten into iOS Development and maybe I might make something there.
But generally speaking. I've learnt almost every language I know from the internet and self-taught myself. The only language I never acquired myself, was Visual Basic which I learnt through school.
I've already explained my story in detail before, I don't feel like re-hashing it. Abridged version:
I played video games. I saw a book called "basic computer games" at an early age on a teacher's shelf, so I picked it up and read it. The teacher said nobody ever read it before and she bought it like 10 years ago, so I could have the book if I wanted it. So I took it home, typed in the programs in qbasic, and my dad helped me and tried to explain things (as a recent CS graduate). After eventually copying games I was playing and making a super-under-done clone of Zelda, I started playing around with VB on Windows 95, and started making applications I wanted to use all the time. Then in 98 or 99 or sometime, Half-life was a thing, and I saw people cheating in this mod called Counter-Strike, and I had to understand how that worked, so I found the source code to this cheat called ViperG which was written in C. So I taught myself C, learned how that worked, then taught myself ASM, and so on and so forth.
It's always been seeing something and wanting to figure out how it works, never looking for a potential career or thinking I should learn to be an engineer. That's also why I have a degree in Math, not CS, because CS was too easy at my school, but Math was curious.
Speaking of, in like 5th grade I wrote a VB6 application as a project for a class, it was a copy of the school's library system. What it did was let you enter details about a book and save the book into a local database, then set how many copies you had, then check in/out books and see who had books checked in/out. When I showed it to the class, the response I got was: "that's it?"
I'm glad to be more successful than 99.9% of them now. The ignorance it took to tell an 11 year old kid who just effectively re-implemented software in spare time that probably billed in excess of $50,000 "that's it?" is pretty astonishing. As vindictive as that sounds, I actually laugh at most of them these days. People working as bartenders/waitresses/accountants/salespeople/retailers at 25. Wow. Feels so good to be just beginning a career and be so far ahead.