A Conversation for The H2G2 Programmers' Corner
Getting started....?
robtee Started conversation Dec 14, 2002
Hi there
I'm an ex-employee of the Games Industry based in Sheffield, UK. I'm currently teaching myself C++ and trying to find a suitable college or Uni course to further my meagre programming skills. I can (or used to) program in good old BASIC back in the day and have decent working knowledge of HTML coding. I love computer games, they are my weakness I afraid, and I'm very keen to back into the industry at a programming level. I'm also a keen level designer and mapper (not relevant, I know, but i love it!).
Anyway, I'm very VERY curious to know how you guys (and gals, of course) got started out in the programming world. The only things I know are are self-taught (isn't the net fantastic?!). I'd like to turn my hobby and my knowledge into soemthing resembling a qualification or, who knows, even a career.
Getting started....?
Marjin, After a long time of procrastination back lurking Posted Dec 14, 2002
As a student way back in the sixties we had to make our own programs, so I taught myself Algol 60. The same way in my job came IBM 360/370 Assembler, SAS, a bit of unix, Fortran PDP8 assembler and so on.
If I needed it, I got a book and started.
Same way with Guide-ML here.
Getting started....?
Dogster Posted Dec 14, 2002
Good luck to you. I don't want to put you off but I think you're setting yourself a big challenge. If you want to be employed to write computer games, as well as learning to program you'll have to learn quite a lot of in-depth technical stuff in one field or another (e.g. artificial intelligence, 3d graphics).
I think starting with C++ is definitely the right thing to do though if this is your interest. I was self-taught too, so I can't really offer any advice on learning. I started programming in AMOS basic on the Amiga, moved to QBASIC when I got a PC for the first time, quickly got annoyed by the lack of graphics and learnt C/C++ and got a copy of DJGPP (www.delorie.com/djgpp) and Allegro (www.talula.demon.co.uk/allegro). Some time later I got a copy of MSVC++ and the DirectX SDK but after a while moved back to using the MSVC++ version of Allegro because quite frankly I didn't find that knowing DirectX was important to me (although this would be different if you were doing it professionally).
Getting started....?
Ion the Naysayer Posted Dec 14, 2002
I think most of the people you talk to on H2G2 will echo "self-taught". I started when I was 5 or 6 (!!) on Commodore BASIC. From there I moved up to QuickBasic on the PC, then took a College level C programming course (I wasn't still finishing Elementary school at this point, mind you). I took a few programming courses in High School but they didn't teach me all that much. After high school I started dabbling in Perl and a few other languages. Now I'm in Software Engineering at University.
I'm lucky enough to live half an hour from Silicon Knights - they're a second party developer for Nintendo now. I don't know if you've seen Legacy of Cain: Blood Omen or Legacy of Cain: Soul Reaver, but those are both Silicon Knights. Hopefully if I'm still interested when I finish my degree, they'll be hiring.
Getting started....?
Ion the Naysayer Posted Dec 14, 2002
err... rather I _was_ still finishing Elementary school.
Getting started....?
MaW Posted Dec 14, 2002
I got taught BASIC by a friend of mine on a good old BBC Micro. Then I learned a bit of FORTRAN, some Pascal, some C, lots more Pascal in the form of Object Pascal for Borland Delphi, then more C and C++. However, I always ran into a wall with my programming level, just some leap I could never make. Doing Computer Science at University has broken that down - they didn't really teach me how to do it (they taught me Java, a language I hate and only use when I absolutely have to), but more showed me how to learn how to do it myself. I guess it's just being in the presence of people who can do all this cool stuff that makes you realise that it's not actually all that hard.
So I've since learned lots more C++, and also Haskell (taught at Uni and then extended by myself because I like it), Perl (also taught at Uni at a very basic level, as is Tcl and Visual Basic, both of which I'd rather forget).
Anyway, if you're teaching yourself, best thing I find is to start out with a project. It doesn't matter if it's small or large or anything anyone will ever use, just as long as you know what you want to do. Then take the thing right through from planning (very important that) to implementation and bugfixing as best you can, and along the way you'll learn a lot about the language, and how it's used to solve real problems. Books try to do that, but they can't really...
And get a decent book. For C++ you really should have a copy of "The C++ Programming Language, 3rd Edition" to hand - it's a first-rate reference book by the creator of the language, covers the latest standardised version and explains all the niggly bits about how things work. It's not a good tutorial though, you'll be wanting something else for that. It is an essential for serious C++ work though, and it's helped me noend. Finally I found out what dynamic_cast<> does and why it can improve my life.
Getting started....?
Dogster Posted Dec 14, 2002
I'll second what MaW said about the C++ book in the previous post. When I'm actually doing some programming it always sits by my side, usually with about four or five different bookmarks in it. It's very dog-eared now, replete with many tea stains, etc. One of the more difficult things (I found) when learning C++ was getting the hang of the STL (Standard Template Libraries), but I think it's worthwhile. At least, I use them all the time now.
Getting started....?
DoctorMO (Keeper of the Computer, Guru, Community Artist) Posted Dec 15, 2002
I can almost echo Ion with his start in programming, my self I started with DOS BASIC and Batch programming, then when I got into high school (finding no IT whatso ever) I enrolled at the local college at 12, I learned Visual Basic and HTML with some multimedia and 3D development work. anything else I've done has been self taught (to tell the truth, during the summer before college I took out some books on Visual Basic and with out a computer at home, taught myself the basics) It's realy not that hard, since I've learnd 8086 Asm, a bit of C++, JavaScripting and alot of Perl, the last two I've realy learned while being employed. being paid for learning things is much better . I'm just hoping my lack of Degrees and even A-Levels won't kill my career prospects.
-- DoctorMO --
Getting started....?
Ion the Naysayer Posted Dec 15, 2002
Ah! Books books books. Yes.
But make sure you get good books.
O'Reilly and Associates has a service called Safari that I subscribed to a few months ago. I won't provide a link because that's against the House Rules but it's easy to find. Basically you pay per month for a number of book slots that you can put any book into (like a bookshelf). The books are online searchable versions of their print editions. They have books from other publishers as well. You can flip through every section of every book without a subscription (the catch is they only give you the top piece of the section until you subscribe). You're allowed to print, save to disk, etc., the only condition being that you are contractually obligated to destroy all the copies you have if you let your subscription lapse.
Heh... Wow, re-reading that, it sounds like an ad... It's not; I'm just a happy customer.
Getting started....?
Sue Posted Dec 15, 2002
Unlike all the others who have answered your question I know nothing about programming - but I want to learn!
My local college has nothing beyond the 'here is the mouse, this is a keyboard' level of computing courses, and working full time makes getting further education expensive and awkward timewise.
I've chosen to go though the Open university. The course I start in February covers some Turbo C and the one pencilled in for next year covers C++. My current aim is the Dipolma in Information technology, but I may well end up doing for the full degree yet. If you're interested the courses are listed at http://www3.open.ac.uk/courses/subjects/technology_page.shtm
Saying this though I have no idea how the courses stand within the industry as I'm not really doing this as a career move.
Good luck whichever route you choose.
Sue
Getting started....?
DoctorMO (Keeper of the Computer, Guru, Community Artist) Posted Dec 16, 2002
I've been told hetting one of those is a good idea.
-- DoctorMO --
Getting started....?
Santragenius V Posted Dec 16, 2002
The nasty thing about this question is how long time ago it was that I did start
Back when I was about 13, I guess, in the local youth-club-school-thingy with Comal-80. From there, after having forced myself to get a structured understanding of by assistant teaching and then teaching it, I went through Pascal & Turbo Pascal and Modula-2.
Nowadays - as I'm not working in IT or programming as such - it's mostly VBA/VB for Office tool development and the web side of things with *TML, CSS and JavaScript.
Have to start looking into ASP quite soon... And yes, books are good I'm actually planning to convince my boss into paying for a Safari account - looks good (I saw a previous mentioning of it here somewhere)
Getting started....?
DoctorMO (Keeper of the Computer, Guru, Community Artist) Posted Dec 16, 2002
Best way to get books on your company that you work for, I've found, is to make it esential for your next project.
-- DoctorMO --
Getting started....?
Santragenius V Posted Dec 16, 2002
My plans exactly - only I plan to make it essential for my next projectS... can't go wrong then, can I?
Getting started....?
DoctorMO (Keeper of the Computer, Guru, Community Artist) Posted Dec 16, 2002
Not unless you let slip that things /can/ be done using somthing you already know, , just you could probbly do it better with this.
-- DoctorMO --
Getting started....?
Ion the Naysayer Posted Dec 16, 2002
ASP? Bleh. ASP is a crime against developers and content creators both. Mixing logic and content is not good. I'm not sure if you've ever tried to debug a CGI script that places Perl variables in HTML template files but if you have you'll understand what I mean.
CGI is a much neater model and it works fine as long as you aren't getting huge numbers of hits or loading a lot of modules at runtime (as a CGI script has to restart every time it's called).
I'll spare you the rant about playing by Microsoft's rules this time since Apache supports ASP as well. If you learn ASP, I would suggest you use JavaScript or PerlScript (is there a PHPScript? Probably...) and not VBScript as VBScript is completely non-standard.
Getting started....?
Santragenius V Posted Dec 16, 2002
Oh, I did plan on using JavaScript. In fact, I planned on using server-side Java - until I realised that the host's not supporting that...
I'll quite largely get into lots of trouble just about very soon after I start working on that stuff - even if the initial database-containing project is a wee one...
Good to know a place where you can ask for help
Getting started....?
Santragenius V Posted Dec 16, 2002
"I'll quite largely get into lots of trouble "<headhurts"
Wonder what I meant by that...? "I'll quite probably" would be my best guess...
Getting started....?
Ion the Naysayer Posted Dec 16, 2002
In absence of Java I would suggest you try Perl or PHP. They're more powerful and flexible than ASP / JavaScript.
Getting started....?
MaW Posted Dec 17, 2002
Excuse me? What's wrong with PHP as a logic model (it's more or less the same as ASP's by the way). Sure, you can turn out hideous code that makes no sense, but that wears off after you've had to maintain it for a while. My PHP code is getting very neat and well-structured now. The important trick is not to think of the content as content, but as a shorthand way of instructing PHP to output markup.
Key: Complain about this post
Getting started....?
- 1: robtee (Dec 14, 2002)
- 2: Marjin, After a long time of procrastination back lurking (Dec 14, 2002)
- 3: Dogster (Dec 14, 2002)
- 4: Ion the Naysayer (Dec 14, 2002)
- 5: Ion the Naysayer (Dec 14, 2002)
- 6: MaW (Dec 14, 2002)
- 7: Dogster (Dec 14, 2002)
- 8: DoctorMO (Keeper of the Computer, Guru, Community Artist) (Dec 15, 2002)
- 9: Ion the Naysayer (Dec 15, 2002)
- 10: Sue (Dec 15, 2002)
- 11: DoctorMO (Keeper of the Computer, Guru, Community Artist) (Dec 16, 2002)
- 12: Santragenius V (Dec 16, 2002)
- 13: DoctorMO (Keeper of the Computer, Guru, Community Artist) (Dec 16, 2002)
- 14: Santragenius V (Dec 16, 2002)
- 15: DoctorMO (Keeper of the Computer, Guru, Community Artist) (Dec 16, 2002)
- 16: Ion the Naysayer (Dec 16, 2002)
- 17: Santragenius V (Dec 16, 2002)
- 18: Santragenius V (Dec 16, 2002)
- 19: Ion the Naysayer (Dec 16, 2002)
- 20: MaW (Dec 17, 2002)
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