Newbie Help

[stansky]

Hi all. First time and i have little or no knowledge of prgraming period. No lingo, or languages. The question i nwant to know is how do people make programs like yahoo, winamp. I would Like TO learn how to make programs. What do i nedd, and how do i do it?

[teknomage1]

Your question is a very difficult one. Here's one guy's take on it http://www.norvig.com/21-days.html . In general you have to find a problem you want to solve, pick a language, learn the language while solving then problem, and then go back to step one. It's hard to give better advice, (like what language to learn and so on) unless you tell us a bit more about yourself and what you want to do.

[redhead]

Everything teknomage1 says, but a bit more elaborated, my take on it would be to get a feel for many programming languages, so you can decide on the best language to write your program in.

If I were to create a controling program for the space shutle, I would rather use ADA or Emerald than C, because those programming languages are build uppon the idear that everything is an object of its own with an assigned semaphor (as described in chapter 6 in Operating System Concepts) to ensure that not two instructions will try to address the same critical section at the same time.
The ease of producing this security is way better in those programming languages than you could ever do in C, but if you only knew C, you'd probably counterweigh the trouble of learning a new language against going through the hassle of implementing it in C.

I guess what I'm trying to describe here, is written in chapter 9 of the book Designing Object-Oriented Software

I know, at this point you're looking at the massive task of lerning how to program, and here I am throwing even more information your way, that just seems to make the getting startet task seem even more insurmountable.
Here you are thinking

• why can't I just get started?
• what do I need all these information for?
• I know what my program should do, why can't I just get it done?
• etc. you know what I'm talking about..

In order to get a good start on your then decided project, chapter 9 of Software Engineering by Roger S Pressman, or perhaps Software Engineering by Ian Sommerville (here it's described in chapter 12) might be a good read.

What I'm trying to say with all this babling, is that when dealing with starting a project of your own, you need to get a well thought scalable design, because once your project starts to take off, a poor design from the beginning will eventualy make it hard to implement user requests.

Or I could just be blowing steam here, since it's your project and first and foremost it should just suit your current needs.. But they can change aswell...

Not that I'm saying "go buy these books" since I found them of no use the first time I read them, but after a few read through they begin to make sence.

[stansky]

I want to start ny making widgets because they look easy!

[redhead]

Sorry for getting a bit harsh here.

I want to start by making widgets because they look easy!

That statement just contradicts everything previus mentioned in this thread.
First of all widgets are just the icing on the cake, if you don't understand the basics on how to make your widget/program/whatever do what you wan't it to, when you click the button or fill in the input field, theres not much use in it anyway.
I'm still gonna mention the Ncurses howto here altho it might not apply in your pointy-clicky world, eventho there are libraries out there that makes things like this easier, theres a whole world behind it which you need to understand, that beeing knowing the coding syntax aswell as the combination and math hidden inside it all.

Think of programming, as a way of spliting every problem up into fragments that can be solved in a series of simple yes/no questions.

First and foremost I would suggest that you learned a programming language like C/C++ since a variaty of other languages uses the same structure/syntax, perhaps with a hint of Tcl/Tk knowledge in order to understand the windows concept. Or if you're used to mathmatical equations, then Moscow ML might be a good introduction into the programming world.
Othervise theres always Perl which among many are seen as an easier language to learn than your ordinary C/C++

[frostyservant]

While I agree with all of the above in theory, if you're an absolute novice who simply wants to get the basic idea of how computer programs work, QBasic is an excellent starting point, IMO. Keep in mind that you'll need to learn another language to write serious programs, but QBasic is an extremely simple and hence useful way to learn the fundamentals of programming.

The compiler, which is a program you'll need to write programs. Click on "compilers" in the menu to the left, and then click on QBasic 7.1.

A great tutorial site.