programming

Leonard G. Warden IV lgw4@sealdog.org
Sun, 19 Nov 2000 16:46:14 -0500 (EST)


Jack,

Good luck in learning to program! Programming is a lot of fun and is not
as hard as many people think (or want you to believe).

I would recommend reading Eric S. Raymond's "How To Become a Hacker"
located at <http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html>. This site
won't teach you how to break into computers, but it will give you an
insight into the mindset and values of your typical UNIX programming guru.

Eric Raymond also recommends Python as a first language, and it is a good
one. A good book for a beginner wanting to learn Python is
_Learning_Python_, by Lutz and Ascher (ISBN: 1565924649). I think there
may be a version of this book for Win32 platforms, but I'm a UNIX user and
I don't pay much attention to what's available for Windows.

There is another language that I'm pretty excited about called Ruby. Ruby
was created by a computer scientist in Japan as a successor language to
Perl and Python. Ruby doesn't provide anything that Perl and Python don't,
but the syntax of the language is really clean and elegant. If you are
interested, there is a book available: _Programming_Ruby_, by Thomas and
Hunt (ISBN: 0201710897). You can learn more about Ruby at
<http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/index.html> or <http://www.rubycentral.com>.

The only other advice I would give you is to learn more than one
programming language. Everyone has to start somewhere, and Python (or
Ruby) is an excellent place to start. However, once you feel comfortable
with your first language, pick another one and learn it. I would recommend
C as a second language because so much software is written in C that it
has become a lingua franca for programmers wishing to discuss programming
concepts.

Again, good luck in learning to program.

Chip Warden