Programming Newbe Questions

[BoilerMan]

Hello all, I am interested in learning how to create executable files or programs and have a few questions. I have a fairly good understanding of how windows based computers operate and have played around with batch files some but have never gone on to learn any programming language or the process of compiling source code. I welcome all help anyone has to offer.

My main considerations are: Should I learn to scritp befor trying to create source code or should I just jump in head first and don’t look back? What type of program language will be easy to learn and work with for some one with no prior experience, as well as being a well rounded language that can be used across a wide variety of platforms? Also just starting out, What language will provide me with low cost or free easy to use compiler? Should I learn to program in windows or would Unix or Linix be a better or easer place to learn, then adapt and apply to other operating systems? There may be other things I should take into consideration as well, that some one with more knowledge could point out.

My main concern is learning and creating programs for my own use at this point but my interest could turn to deployment later on, probably much later on, but this is something to think about anyway.

Thanks in advance for any input, it’s all welcome and encouraged, BoilerMan
:t

[ScaryBinary]

Well....

C is a pretty easy language to learn. It's one of those languages that is fairly simple to start with, but can become very powerful once you start diving deeper into the launguage. It is pretty portable, too, so it can work with both Windows, Unix, etc. There are free compilers available as well (check out Gnu.org (http://www.gnu.org/directory/devel/compilers/)). You could begin coding in C today with Notepad and the free Gcc compiler....

C++ would be a next step. If you want to do Windows programming, you almost have to learn this so you can use Microsoft's huge libraries. The object oriented stuff can be a little confusing if you haven't dealt with it before, but once the basic concepts sink in it's a pretty fun language.

Visual Basic is real easy to use (if you have any Microsoft Office program, you can use that to write Visual Basic programs via the Tools > Macros > Visual Basic Editor menu options) but I'm pretty sure it will only work under Windows.

If you want to do web-based stuff, than you can learn php, ASP, perl, etc. ASP is Visual Basic based, but most other "scripting" languages are similar or no more complicated to C.

At any rate, decide what kind of programs you want to write. If they are Operating System type programs, then I'd stick with C and C++ as they'll be fairly portable. For web-based scripting, I'd say php and perl are necessary.

I'm sure other people will have additional (and probably better :D ) advice. If it were up to me we'd all be programming in Ada! :cool:

[ScaryBinary]

I probably don't need to point this out, but there are a million tutorial-type websites for just about every language. So, whatever language you pick, a quick internet search will provide many starting points. For example, a search for 'C Tutorial' (http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=C+Tutorial) resulted in 5,790,000 hits.

Happy reading! :p

[BoilerMan]

Thank You, this is just the kind of advice I was looking for. Will check out the links.:t

[fishybawb]

Originally posted by ScaryBinary If it were up to me we'd all be programming in Ada! :cool:

:eek:

I spent a year programming Ada at university after they scrapped Pascal from the "basic programming" syllabus. It's an... umm... interesting language :p

[FusionX]

I know a little C/C++, and it isn't as difficult as I was led into believing. But if I were going to learn a programming language, I'd say that Python would be the easiest.

http://www.python.org/

[BoilerMan]

Thanks FusionX, I will check that out. For anyone who like me, Knows nothing about coding, there is a very elamentry tutoral on C coding @ how stuff works. It's worth a look any way. Heck, now that I went through it I think I'm redy to write mo own operating system!....lol Well maby not just yet. Thanks again for the help all. BoilerMan

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/c.htm