General Question

[Dustallica]

All right guys,

I've taken two semesters of VB6 in high school and am currently in my Intro to Programming class in college, which is taught with VB.Net, and i know that im going to have JAVA and C# classes coming up soon.

Do you guys have any suggestions of websites or books i should read so i know what to expect?

Thanks in advance.

[juanvaldes]

msdn.microsoft.com & java.sun.com will have more then you care to know

also google loves you. love him too.

[cheerios]

ok, #1: oreiley is the man when it comes to coding books. #2: do google searches, check out hte api's for the languages you're interested in, and, honestly, just wait for the class! They don't chuck you in the deep end and expect you to swim! I'm TA'ing for an intro to programming in Java class, and almost 3 weeks into the semseter, we've worked our way upto calling functions. You've got the background, you'll be able to keep up no problem (assuming you get what you're doing now).

[Dustallica]

Thanks guys...i wasn't looking into starting anything advanced. Just wanted to get a feel for the syntax and such.

[cheerios]

not to sound obvious, but go, read some code...

[Fallon]

If you understand one programming language, you pretty much know them all, all you gotta change is the syntax a lil bit, and function calls. At least that's what I've been told and I've seen in C/C++/VB/and the bits of Java I've looked at. If you wanna get ahead with the class, just look around online, look at some code, see if www.free-ed.net has any books about it.
Hopefully that helps.

[hrdwareguy]

Check out what books they are using in those classes and look at them. That will give you a great idea of what to expect.

[ratbastid]

Originally posted by Fallon
If you understand one programming language, you pretty much know them all, all you gotta change is the syntax a lil bit, and function calls.

I'd say that's generally true EXCEPT where it comes to procedural versus Object Oriented languages. I had to completely relearn how to program when I started picking up Java. There are Ways you Do Things that just don't translate.

Of course, once I did I started building all my Perl OO-style too....

[kel]

Procedural vs. Object oriented? Easy.
Lisp/Scheme/any of the other stuff out there vs. Any normal programming language.

Hard...

[cheerios]

pfft, scheme's not that scary if you understand the concept of recursion, and I mean REALLY understand it. (please note it's still scary, just not as much, and not enough to take it out of the realm of "normal" languages).

[cowlick]

Originally posted by kel
Procedural vs. Object oriented? Easy.
Lisp/Scheme/any of the other stuff out there vs. Any normal programming language.

Hard...

Great trick for those procedural language people trying to grasp functional programming - write a LISP interpretter in C or C++ or Java. This is probably the fastest (6 hours maybe) way to learn LISP that I have seen.

[Merlocke]

Originally posted by cheerios
pfft, scheme's not that scary if you understand the concept of recursion, and I mean REALLY understand it. (please note it's still scary, just not as much, and not enough to take it out of the realm of "normal" languages).

recursion is hard
Of course this is coming from a non-coder who has more of a networking background, who really should just be in project management, or pre-sales... *sigh*

Just hearing that term makes me afraid