[Aleisha]

Pretty much I finished a course in IT at college 2 years ago and it left me yearning to learn more about programs. They taught us all about networking and a lot about the legal side to computing, there was a small segment about programming but it was done on visual basic

I just want to learn how to program. Mostly websites and HTML would be nice. But I’d like to get more advanced in time.

Any links you could share or PDFs that would help would be nice!

[Amit]

Sounds like the course I am doing at college now, even down to learning Visual Basic. Dislike that language very much.

If your main interest is websites, you want to be looking to learn HTML and PHP. I think ASP.NET is too specific personally, and PHP is a lot more widely used. The way I learnt HTML and PHP was simply by setting myself a project (even if it’s not that simple) and looking up how to do things when I needed to. I think it’s pretty much the best way to learn, especially when you have previous knowledge of VB. It’s important for you to follow links though, even if it means you spend half the day reading, because that way you’ll get to know the best and most efficient ways to do things! Question everything and befriend Stackoverflow.

Hope that helps, and good luck

[SapnaVishwas]

You’ll like C# much more than Visual Basic. With that learned you can got into web dev with ASP.NET (recomment MVC), Windows 8 development, Windows Phone development etc Smile
Learning resources are everywhere. There is bunch of books, tutorials. Pluralsight has some good stuff that you’d probably like so go for it Smile
http://www.codeproject.com
is a good place to see other people’s projects and when u get a problem that you cannot solve there is
http://stackoverflow.com/

[Abhey]

Learning how or where to program is not an easy question to answer.

Programming is a discipline that combines Art (elegant solutions) and Science (Math, logic, procedures) into an envelope that represents your style.

Many, many years ago (60’s, 70’s and 80’s) most applications were single language programs. You would do the traditional Systems Analysis complete with reports and spending justifications and then (skipping many steps) you wrote C, Pascal, Fortran, COBOL, Lisp or some other language, compiled and linked it to an executable on some hardware platform and you had a working program/system which you then debugged and handed over to some client (again skipping many steps) to use.

In todays world, things are in many places, they exist in cyberspace or cloud, on local machines, etc. Systems today can contain many different languages combined. For example: years ago I created an Access Database (VBA Script) that sends data to a Server in cyberspace that that I wrote using PHP that then loaded the uploaded information into a MySQL database which was the data storage for a website that was written in PHP and used also used Java Script.

That’s just one example. The possibilities are endless.

But the Devil is not in the details or procedures.

You can’t program in any language if you can’t solve problems; if you can’t break apart a known problem down to the individual components necessary to create the algorithmic solution to solve or perform the task.

I found a series of videos on YouTube from MIT that does just this. If you watch these videos and do the assignments (in Python) you will learn a) how to create solutions to problems and b) learn a new language if you already don’t have Python under your belt.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bX3jvD7XFPs

Once you truly understand the concept of problem solving then the world is your oyster! You can write your own ticket. Then it’s a matter of preference as to what area you decide to work in.

For me, I hate anything that has anything to do with .NET but that’s me. I love PHP, Objective C used to be a favorite in the 90’s when I was programming on NeXT computers using the NeXTSTEP Operating System, and other development environments. I actually enjoy (to a limited degree) working with VBA and Microsoft Access Databases. It’s a much nicer development environment than Visual Studio or .NET (at least for me because even though I use Access I’m not really a fan at all of Microsoft.) and I have enjoyed working on other things as well.

For me I’m about as tired of programming as a person can be. I’ve been doing it since the late 70’s and I’ve worked on some cool things. I saw the birth of the World Wide Web in November, 1991; I’ve played on Cray computers and was part of a project where we piped a 15 minute video created by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas over 30,000 miles of fiber optic cable using an ATM network. These were among the first video transmissions (stuff we take for granted today) over fiber optic networks in the early 90’s and all kinds of other really cool projects.

There was a time when I couldn’t wait to get on a computer and do some coding! I would wake up at 3:30 AM with a solution to a problem and go into work to code it. This was before it was common place to operate a computer remotely.

Now, cooking is my new passion, or revived passion. I’ve always loved to cook.

Good luck and happy programming.

[ShikhaTan]

Best way to approach programming to have to have definite project in mind. I started out trying to write a TV repair database system. You need to analyse what is done with all the objects involved. Then design the database to match all the required actions. Ultimately it was over engineered so ,my advice would be to keep it simple.