#beginning programming

[loathsomelilac]

there’s an intro to programming course offered at my school that I considered registering for but I have a few concerns.

1. It’s gonna be my last semester and I wasn’t planning on taking any challenging courses. The only mandatory classes I have left are senior project and senior seminar, and then I’m taking some fun classes that won’t require any actual thinking on my part. This might sound lazy but honestly I’ve been at this school for FIVE years and I just wanna gtfo with no problems lol. 

2. I took beginning and intermediate programming, as well as ap comp sci in high school. I sucked at it, but I’m worried that I might get bored in this class and not take it seriously.

3. My team leader from senior project (who I’ve been having a lot of issues with) will be taking the course, and idk if I can deal with him for that many hours a day. We’ll already be spending most of our class and “free” time working together, and he’s a LOT to deal with. 

4. This one is gonna sound bad but like...there’s gonna be a lot of freshmen comp sci students in that class and ummm...the comp sci kids (not all but so many) at my school are the absolute worst and dealing with them but as freshmen sounds like hell. 

[programming-with-exception]

Hi, Exception! I want to make my first game. The problem is, I don't know a lot of code (or complex math), or where to even begin. What programs/languages would you recommend for someone just starting out? Thanks!

Thank you for acting as a catalyst of my ventures into social spaces, person who is obviously not Remilia. I will attempt to restrain my focus towards the more computation-y sides of programming and make actually sane suggestions here.

Let’s do a bit of Process of Elimination:

Languages close to the hardware-level are a bit too complex to start with, so everything C++ and below is out

Scripting languages are usually more for specific utility, and might be too far a branch of the family tree of programming languages, so those are out too.

Java was the language I was taught first, mainly for school class reasons, but it seems to have fallen out of favor for programming games

With this completely rough filtering out of the way,  and a tough of my own personal bias and experience added in for good measure, here is my suggestion: The C# Language.

C# is a good start for learning programming in general, as it has a lot of features you can see in most other languages. In addition, a lot of Game-making tools (I think of Unity and MonoGame) use C# as the language of choice, so those tools will be of use to you to help you get started.

Alternatively, if you really want something on the screen as fast as possible with little work, you may also want to look at Processing too. It’s based on Java, but a lot of the work of starting to see results is done for you (plus Java and C# are pretty similar, so translating should be easy enough after a while).

I cannot give you much in the art of actually learning, mostly because I don’t know how myself, but this should be a good-enough technical outline to get you into the world of being bit-lingual. Good luck!

[ccldteens]

Tomorrow night, Tues. March 1 @ Steele Library! We are trying something new to us!  Build your bot, tweak the programming (we’ll show you how) & bash bots together. Or maybe race them. It all depends on how accurate our programming is (!) Whatever happens, we’ll have fun!  Don’t forget to sign up! :-)  Special thanks to teen Jacob (whose idea this was) & college volunteer Nova!

[pterofaur]

Hello World!

Hello World! I thought I would start a collection of the myriad little projects I have begun, failed and finished in my journey to teach myself how to program. There may also be some lessons along the way. I started programming about a year before I began this blog so there is a bunch of material through. The objectives for this blog:

Document my processes and state of mind

Catalog my progress

Display my paltry wares

Why do I program:

At the moment programming is just a hobby of mine. 

Nothing has been more empowering than to see my thoughts turned into reality. I no longer say, "I wish this widget could do this". I now say, "I'll do it when I get the time to, after I write this other thing".  

With the resources available for free online these days, it is incredibly approachable. Amateur programming is the modern day evolution of DIY , "Better Hardware and Software". I encourage anyone with any inkling of interest to have a look. Check out Codeacademy, Coursera and EDx for free courses and materials.

[deathbycode]

“Before software can be reusable it first has to be usable.” - Ralph Johnson (computer scientist)

[keepcalmandprogram]

A programmer will eventually tell you to use Mac OSX or Linux. If the programmer likes fonts and typography, they'll tell you to get a Mac OSX computer. If they like control and have a huge beard, they'll tell you to install Linux.

Zed A. Shaw

[everymon]

Baby steps #2

Back again! Promised to explain operators and here's the post about them. Once again if I go to fast just tell me ;)

In my previous post I said that the equal sign is an operator. An operator 'operates' (oh wow) on values (operands). The equal sign is the assignment operator. It assigns a value.

costOfBurger = 1;

So here the value of 1 is assigned to the variable costOfBurger.

Certain operators don't operate on every value. Values have data types. In the previous post I declared a variable:

int costOfBurger;

The variable costOfburger can hold values of the data type integer (whole numbers).

You can declare variables of the same datatype on the same line:

int wholeNumberOne, wholeNumberTwo, wholeNumberThree;

Operands other than the equal sign are +, -, /, * etcetera. Another data type is string. You can't use the * operator on strings (example of string: "anything between the quotation marks, even numbers"). "A little" * "A little" = ... yeah right.

Using variables and operators we could make a counter!

int counter; counter = 0;

Now we want to add 1 to the counter:

counter = counter + 1;

Because this is so common most languages have an operator specially for this:

counter++; (also for substraction of 1 -> counter--;)

Also counter = counter ... is a bit dull to write so you can also do the following:

counter += 1; (adds 1) counter -= 1; (subtracts 1)

Well that's it for today! Next time I'm going to write about methods. The most wicked things ever. I'm pretty sure that soon I'll show you guys a program =D Stay tuned ;)