90% self taught. First programming book I ever read was the Turbo Pascal Reference Book. Seriously.... no tutorial books or anything, dove straight into the language itself. Self-taught the following: Pascal, VB(3,4,6), .NET, (X)HTML, C, BASIC, ASP, PHP; had formal training (courtesy of the USAF) on: ADA, COBOL, SQL, ASM; semi-formal training on: LogoBASIC, Apple BASIC.
When I was around 10, my parents sent me to a computer camp thing. Learned real simple programming, and alot of just dealing with computers (apple at the time). We used to type CATALOG and a list of files would list off the tape media. There were no sub-dirs.
Then when I was 12 my Dad got me a COmmodore VIC-20 and some programming books. I spent the following couple years typing in programs that were listed in the books. None of them ever worked correctly. They always needed debugging. The files used to get stored on a casstette tape. You had to know by the little counter where your files were stored on it.
Amiga followed VIC-20, and 286 followed Amiga, where I mostly used a Basic language of some sort. Then it was off to college (EE and CS), and the rest is history.
Nobody knows what software they want until after you've delivered what they originally asked for.
Don't solve problems which don't exist.
"If I had eight hours to cut down a tree, I'd spend six hours sharpening my axe." --- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
Started off with my 2x86 that my sister got when I was realy young. SHe never used it so I took the time to play some games on it, and found out that it was possible to make games using qBasic on it. Then I took a computer class when I was 15 and finished off the whole 12 month course in 3 months. And my teacher was an old Pascal programmer, so I showed some interest, and he let me play with VB3 and borrowed me a book that I could study on my own.
Then I programmed in VB5 and then VB6 on my own. Then I started at high school and took a computer class there. When I finished my (6hours) Access exams in 2 hours, I started making games and so in VBA so the guy that corected my exam could have some fun. Then they had a 6months course in Java, that I finished in 4weeks. And thought the teacher a few things before I left.
Then I started my bachelour in CS, and I have done Java, C++ (QT/OpenGL), C#, ASM, PHP, JS, (X)HTML, Prolog, MathLab and some other unusefull languages and stuff.
But the most importent thing is that I have read 20+ books on my own for various topics (mostly game related) after school, and been doing DirectX the last 4-5 years now. That is the fun part of programming.
Books were the only choice back then, as the Internet wasn't around. I believe that you can read a lot less printed copy to get as good an education by using the Internet. I've taken many classes, read many books, and taught myself alot of things. I have used Basic for decades!
But one things has REALY changed since your yong days dglienna (don't take it offencive that I just said that.....didn't mean it that way..). Some years ago it was importent to grab all the information you could get, and then process it. Now it is just as importent to destinguish between good info and not so good info. Because you can't process half of it. The Internet has too much info, and not everyhing is usefull, and not everything is corect.
PS: Hope someone understood the essence here, even if I am not covinced that I managed to write what I ment...
You have to see BAD things before you can recognize good things. I agree, but there are things that are commonly agreed to be good, even if they don't appear so on the surface. With code, you can try it yourself. If it doesn't work, they you could say that it is bad and give up, or you could try to fix it and learn more, whether or not it works.
286?? Geez, I'm jealous.... my initial learning was on an I.B.M. 8088.... the ORIGINAL IBM8088.... not some clone.... 256k memory Woo-Hoo! Dual floppy, no HD (at first, later we got a whopping 32M HD). It was so old, that you'd power it on, and the lights in the house would dim, then slowly come back up as the power company catches up.
Dave - I'm even more jealous, I had always wanted an Amiga, they had seemed superior to PC clones at the time. I wonder what they would have been like had the pace kept up....
Dave - I'm even more jealous, I had always wanted an Amiga, they had seemed superior to PC clones at the time. I wonder what they would have been like had the pace kept up....
Tg
You weren't missing as much as you think; as often as Windows gives you the Blue Screen of Death, just as often an Amiga would give you a Guru Meditation Error LOL:
Nobody knows what software they want until after you've delivered what they originally asked for.
Don't solve problems which don't exist.
"If I had eight hours to cut down a tree, I'd spend six hours sharpening my axe." --- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
Just curious to see where most of you learned to program?
Most of what I know I read in books, then basically taught to myself.
My 1st VB book was "Visual Basic 6 Database - How To" by SAMS books. (the makes of the teach yourself in 24hrs books).
I learned Basic in 1988 in School. We had gw-basic and an old XT PC. The 386 had just arrived at that time. It was something new and fast.
1998 - I went to work for a small firm and I read a couple of books including a book called "THE VB BLUE BOOK". That got me started on VB4 32 bit. Then onto to VB5 and finally in 1999 we moved to VB6.
Presently doing .NET. I haven't yet found any good books on .NET. I refer to online resources mostly and vbforums.com
Everything that has a computer in will fail. Everything in your life, from a watch to a car to, you know, a radio, to an iPhone, it will fail if it has a computer in it. They should kill the people who made those things.- 'Woz' save a blobFileStreamDataTable To Text Filemy blog
286?? Geez, I'm jealous.... my initial learning was on an I.B.M. 8088.... the ORIGINAL IBM8088.... not some clone.... 256k memory Woo-Hoo! Dual floppy, no HD (at first, later we got a whopping 32M HD). It was so old, that you'd power it on, and the lights in the house would dim, then slowly come back up as the power company catches up.
Dave - I'm even more jealous, I had always wanted an Amiga, they had seemed superior to PC clones at the time. I wonder what they would have been like had the pace kept up....
Tg
Got ya beat on that account. I started on a TRS-80 Level 1 w/ 4k RAM and a tape drive. To do graphics, you took a piece of graph paper, drew your image on it, then turned on each *pixel* that your line covered. My father programmed a turkey whoes eyebrows went up an down, and that about maxed out the memory.
One of the fun things you could do back then would be to go to a computer store, write a quick little program (all computers had BASIC installed) that put the computer into an infinite loop. Most of the sale people at the time had no idea what the computer was (has it changed?), so this would pretty much blow their fuses.
Got ya beat on that account. I started on a TRS-80 Level 1 w/ 4k RAM and a tape drive. To do graphics, you took a piece of graph paper, drew your image on it, then turned on each *pixel* that your line covered. My father programmed a turkey whoes eyebrows went up an down, and that about maxed out the memory.
One of the fun things you could do back then would be to go to a computer store, write a quick little program (all computers had BASIC installed) that put the computer into an infinite loop. Most of the sale people at the time had no idea what the computer was (has it changed?), so this would pretty much blow their fuses.
Got you beat - DIGITAL PDP-11 with ASR 33 terminal - paper tape - no memory for program storage given to the students at all. The PDP-11 actually had lights - flashing as memory registers we touched. Switches on the front to set the boot address. It was the size of 4 refrigerators.
Eventually we got VT-50 dumb-terminals for the DIGITAL PDP-11 at school - 12 lines (every other line blank) of 80 characters across.
When TRS-80 with "cassette tape" storage came along - wow...
I've got all of you beat. I used paper and pencil. It was so primitive, I had to emulate the beeps and whirring noises while I pretended it was booting up.
I've got all of you beat. I used paper and pencil. It was so primitive, I had to emulate the beeps and whirring noises while I pretended it was booting up.
Actually ALL our programming exams, no matter if it is Java, PHP, JS, C++, OGL, QT, ASM, C# or what ever, we have to use pen and paper.......
We still use pen and paper. There is no substitute. But we don't make any noises.
Everything that has a computer in will fail. Everything in your life, from a watch to a car to, you know, a radio, to an iPhone, it will fail if it has a computer in it. They should kill the people who made those things.- 'Woz' save a blobFileStreamDataTable To Text Filemy blog
Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer was my first machine. Surprisingly enough, its BASIC was written by Microsoft in 1981.
Got a coco2, and then a coco3 (512k with 256 color palette WHOO!).
I used to have about 100 Rainbow magazines. They would come to your door every month with about 5 applications you would have to type them in and then save to cassete tape (and later a 5 1/4" floppy.) Spent about 4 years programming on those machines until I was 13. http://www.vavasour.ca/jeff/level1/simulator.html
I then stopped programming all together for about 9 years - then took a Java course in college and haven't looked back since.
For my BS I had to take a few programming courses (asm, ansi c, asp) but I wouldn't say I learned how to program. I may have learned some things about programming, but I was much more into networking then. Then I got this job about 10 months ago as a programmer, and they threw a HUGE program at me and said "here, convert this to oracle. ready? GO!"
so..i would say i learned how to program about 10 months ago by...doing it.
Got you beat - DIGITAL PDP-11 with ASR 33 terminal - paper tape - no memory for program storage given to the students at all. The PDP-11 actually had lights - flashing as memory registers we touched. Switches on the front to set the boot address. It was the size of 4 refrigerators.
Eventually we got VT-50 dumb-terminals for the DIGITAL PDP-11 at school - 12 lines (every other line blank) of 80 characters across.
When TRS-80 with "cassette tape" storage came along - wow...
My father worked for Digital for many years, then bailed out a few years before the company was bought by Compaq. Did pretty well there, but fortunately, he never brought his work home with him (no PDP-11 in the house).
I taught myself as well. I got VB6 from a friend and just played around with it for a few days not knowning anything about it. I found out about pscode.com from another friend over AIM and just started looking at some basic tutorials from there.
From that I learned VB in about 2 months from trial and error.
Was pretty fun. Then I got to teach a friend of mine VB. That was great cause he learned it in about 2 days. We just stayed up for both days all night just programming. Was pretty fun. Now we have our own little company.
You weren't missing as much as you think; as often as Windows gives you the Blue Screen of Death, just as often an Amiga would give you a Guru Meditation Error LOL:
OMG!!! That's the first machine I learned programming on. The Amiga 500!!! I started learning Amiga BASIC since I was 10 (I'm 23 now) for 7 years straight. In between that time I was messing around a little bit (in rare occasions) with Apple][c BASIC. I always wanted to make video games since I was hooked on them since I was 2 dating back to the ol Atari/Nintendo days. That's mainly why I took interest in programming. Anyways, when I was 16 years old, I took my first programming class in highschool, which had VB 4.0 Professional Edition. Got VB 5.0 Leanring Edition that same year for Christmas and still use it to this day. I failed the class that year cause I was always too busy making games. Took Computer Programming 1 again next year, passed it, then took Computer Programming 2. That's the period I began learning how to make 3D engines (non DirectX and in pure VB). Bought myself tons of 3D game engine/game programming books. I managed to get to the point to where I had perspective correct texturemapped polygons with Z-Buffering in pure VB! Unfortunately it only ran at a max of 20 - 30 FPS.
Now I'm in college majoring in Computer Programming and Analysis, and plan on changing my degree program to Game Design if and when the degree program is added at Valencia Community College, which will be soon. As a hobbyist, I'm a DirectX and OpenGL junkie and work on 3D games all the time...errr actually when I find time since now I just got into DJing and working on getting myself hooked up with my future girlfriend, Stephanie.
1980 - I was born (accompanied by earthquakes and lightning ) 1987 - Atari ST, FirSTBasic and GFA Basic 1991 - GFA Assembler (Not for long, too hard! Hey I was only 11 ) 1994 - Windows 3 and brief spell on C, mostly doing QB though 1995 - Windows 95 came out!!! Spent a year or two just using windows, not programming. Started to play with open source C++ compilers 1999 - VB4, VB6, joined VBF 2000 to present - Vb6 mostly until 2003 when I started C# and VB.Net
Currently meddling with anything that takes my interest, particularly 2D/3D Graphics and computer vision simulations. Pattern matching and Genetic Algorithms have fascinated me for years, getting good enough at them to be able to apply them to useful situations.
When I were a little lad, not too many moons ago, I saw the turlte thing controlled by a bbc computer that took instructions on movement. I guess that is the very first ever language to learn.
From there it was
Basic on a Spectrum,
Basic on a BBC
Basic on RiscPC
Pascal (A level - whata crap lang )
HTML
VBA Access
VB 5/6 /\
VBA Excel
Mostly it was books/magazines initially (as they had the follow this examples) then VBA was a weeks course and two huge books (the books I bought for reference. VB5/6 was experimenting plus internet tutorials. Self taught and real life influenced the rest of learning.
Feeling like a fly on the inside of a closed window (Thunk!)
If I post a lot, it is because I am bored at work! ;D Or stuck...
* Anything I post can be only my opinion. Advice etc is up to you to persue...
1980 - I was born (accompanied by earthquakes and lightning ) 1987 - Atari ST, FirSTBasic and GFA Basic 1991 - GFA Assembler (Not for long, too hard! Hey I was only 11 ) 1994 - Windows 3 and brief spell on C, mostly doing QB though 1995 - Windows 95 came out!!! Spent a year or two just using windows, not programming. Started to play with open source C++ compilers 1999 - VB4, VB6, joined VBF 2000 to present - Vb6 mostly until 2003 when I started C# and VB.Net
Currently meddling with anything that takes my interest, particularly 2D/3D Graphics and computer vision simulations. Pattern matching and Genetic Algorithms have fascinated me for years, getting good enough at them to be able to apply them to useful situations.
Feeling like a fly on the inside of a closed window (Thunk!)
If I post a lot, it is because I am bored at work! ;D Or stuck...
* Anything I post can be only my opinion. Advice etc is up to you to persue...
Feeling like a fly on the inside of a closed window (Thunk!)
If I post a lot, it is because I am bored at work! ;D Or stuck...
* Anything I post can be only my opinion. Advice etc is up to you to persue...
My first program was written along about 1980 using BASICA which was an interpretive (could not be compiled) form of the Basic language. This used to come with IBM DOS as a freebie. My first program was run on an IBM PC (the kind that had two floppy disk drives and required a Boot disk in Drive A: )
My first foray into Visual Development was in 1993 with VB3.
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...didn't mean it that way..
Originally Posted by techgnome
Re: Where did you learn to program?
....
Re: Where did you learn to program?
Took Computer Programming 1 again next year, passed it, then took Computer Programming 2. That's the period I began learning how to make 3D engines (non DirectX and in pure VB). Bought myself tons of 3D game engine/game programming books. I managed to get to the point to where I had perspective correct texturemapped polygons with Z-Buffering in pure VB! Unfortunately it only ran at a max of 20 - 30 FPS.
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