[ILUG] introduction to programming

[Kevin Philp]

On Tuesday 24 May 2005 11:13, James McCarthy wrote:
>does anyone have any idea's about the best way of introducing nebies
>to programming (on linux)?

A difficult question and one likely to cause flame wars. So here is my 
tuppence worth.

I began on Northstar Extended Basic around 1980. It was horrible, Basic has 
improved but is still horrible. A lot of colleges use Visual Basic (WHY!!). 
Don't start with BASIC.

For learning I would also avoid languages that make you look after your own 
memory, so I would avoid C and C++. If you become a games programmer or 
Kernel hacker you will need to learn them but avoid them for starters.

If you want to go the C/C++ route try Borland's Kylix which is a Pascal and 
C++ compiler with an excellent GUI front end. I learn't Pascal on Borlands 
Turbo Pascal compiler and later used their C++ compiler. If you want to learn 
to program GUI front ends and learn about object oriented programming they 
are pretty good products. The freely downloadable version has some bits 
missing but they are mainly related to enterprise programming and stuff you 
won't miss until you turn professional. The Kdevelop front end is also pretty 
good but harder than Kylix to learn.

I agree with the contributor who advised finding a project that interests you. 
If you are into websites try PHP, it is quite similar to C in many ways but 
is much safer and easier. I would avoid PERL as the "more than one way to do 
it" philosophy can be confusing for beginners. PHP is generally out of the 
box installed and working with Apache from any Linux distribution. You can 
embed it directly in your HTML web pages so you can start very small. It will 
also run outside the web environment if you want to try other things.

If you want to do graphics programming you might try JAVA. Personally I don't 
like it but it has the advantage for a beginner of being quite similar to C++ 
but handles memory for you so you are unlikely to bring your machine crashing 
down. Also the JAVA tutorials available on the web are quite good. 

I have heard great things about PYTHON but have never used it. I plan to 
correct that soon.

You will find that once you have learn't your first couple of languages its 
quite easy to move around. They nearly all have similar loops just with 
different syntax, they have similar ways of doing functions, similar ways of 
defining blocks and if they are object oriented will have similar ways of 
accessing methods etc. A lot have their routes in C (Java, Perl, PHP). Also 
over time they have tended to get extended and pick up the better bits of 
other languages ie Borland's Pascal picked up object orientation around about 
Turbo Pascal 6. Because of this even the older languages now share a lot in 
common.

When you are bored with C++, Java and Python there are a few languages that 
are truly DIFFERENT and they are great fun to play with. Try Prolog and throw 
everything you ever knew about programming in the fire!

Kevin.