starting out

[rorpan]

Hey i'm interesting in spending some time to learn a computer language. looking for the best way to get a start. Want to get some marketable skills in order to persue a job. Trying to put together and education plan. i'm pretty good with hardware but I believe the real opportuniities lie in software. Any ideas about a good way to start my experiance in programming? Any tips or links appreciated.
RoR

[Jacob Roman]

Start off simple, like with Visual Basic 6. Learn the basic programming concepts, such as If statements, For loops, variables, data types, arrays, pointers, Do loops, etc. You can use the forums to help yourself learn, or ask questions whenever you need help. Read some books on VB6, and look at some tutorials on it.

I would suggest to start off learning VB.NET, since it's the latest VB release, but it's more difficult to learn since they completely changed the language, and now has a different syntax. Once you get better at programming, you can tackle on C++, VB.NET, C#, Java, etc.

[penagate]

You can start with any language really but probably the easiest is some form of BASIC like Jacob suggests... you can get simpler Basic's than VB but VB is good for seeing results quickly which tends to give you a boost

Once you've mastered program flow and things like functions you can go in two directions, if you are really good with hardware you may want to try assembly, or you could go in the other direction and try .NET or some other higher-level language. If you do decide to learn assembly then you can move to C (which is basically shorthand assembly) and then C++, which adds object orientation support. Jumping sideways from VB to C/C++ is quite hard becuase you need to "unlearn" a lot of VB to become proficient in C++.

Anyways good luck and if you have any Q's feel free to post a thread in these forums and one of us will help ya

[RobDog888]

I disagree with the suggestions as if you dont already know VB6 then learning VB.NET is allot easier as you dont have any of the bad logic and non-OOP ways. It was killer for me to re-learn and go from VB6 to .NET. If you have the nack for logic then you can start with most any language other then C, C++, etc. as they are really intense.

[Hack]

I think a really important question here is what kind of finances do you have?

Learning any programming language means having access to that language which generally means having to go out and purchase a copy of that language.

Do you have the wherewithall to purchase a copy of VB.NET? or C++, or for that matter, even VB6?

[penagate]

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/

[tr333]

If you are considering learning C, you can't go past "The C Programming Language" by Kernighan & Ritchie (K&R). It is the definitive textbook on C and was considered to be the standard before ANSI C and C99.

[rorpan]

Wow thanks guys for all the great info. It is very helpfull

I think a really important question here is what kind of finances do you have?
yes I do have the money to purchase. However, I would like to buy the right program and get heading in the right direction.
Thanks again for the tips

[Hack]

Wow thanks guys for all the great info. It is very helpfull

I think a really important question here is what kind of finances do you have?
yes I do have the money to purchase. However, I would like to buy the right program and get heading in the right direction.
Thanks again for the tips

In that case, I would definately go the .NET route.