Cerdenn

Hello

I am new here. Changes in my life have made me decide that I would like to get back into programming (I took a few classes in college almost 10 years ago). I am not in any position to go back to school. So I thought I would teach myself and work my way up bit by bit. I did learn a little C++ back in college. Should I start there? What is a good book to use? I feel confident in this as I know there are many resources on the net to help me along the way.

Thank you in advance

DaWei

How are you at solving problems? The language is almost incidental in that context. If you want to know how the hardware truly solves abstract problems in a down and dirty way, then get down and dirty. If you're only interested in solutions, then pick the most abstract and inefficient language you can find and comprehend.

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Abstraction doesn't make it impossible to write bad code; it makes it possible to write superior code.
Contributor's Corner: Grumpy on C++ Exceptions DaWei on Pointers

grumpy

In addition to Dawei's comments, you need to decide what type of applications you want to develop. If you just want to play with programming, then it doesn't actually matter what language you use.

If you want to do lots of text processing, assembler is probably not the right language but perl might be. Fortran will be a good choice for numerical analysis, but perl would not sub-optimal. For some things (eg GUI, database manipulation) availability of libraries and development environments is more important than the language you use.
Abstraction is not the same thing as inefficiency. If you are using a language that supports high levels of abstraction, you can do things in a few lines of code that would take pages of code in another language. Languages that support high levels of abstraction can be more efficient in terms of programming effort, and less efficient in terms of runtime overhead, than languages that support less abstraction. Languages that support higher levels of abstraction also require more effort from the programmer to understand the abstractions and use them rationally -- including avoiding the overhead of applying language features that are unnecessary to solving the problem at hand.

Harakim

Are you looking to get a job with this knowledge or just playing around? I have heard lots of good things about Ruby lately. If I were to start over, I think that I would try that language. It really depends on your goals. Once you decide what you want to do, everyone here can reccommend websites, languages, and books.

Overmind

Well, if you've done C++ before, then that might be the best option since it should be easier to pick up again, or you could also try any other C based language (java, PHP...)

Personaly, if I were to start over, Python would be my choice due to its neatness and simplicity.

That, my friend, is called Brainfuck.

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Jimbo

Or Whitespace. Or if you're really a masochist, Malbolge.

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Harakim

Brainfuck is pretty efficient and not very abstracted!

lectricpharaoh

I think you should consider what you want to do. C++ is definitely worth learning more of, but if you want to play around with making GUIs and such, it's generally not the easiest language for that sort of thing (though there are toolkits and libraries available). Another language you might want to look into is C#, as you can get the compiler and some IDEs free, and C# makes it easy to develop Windows GUI applications. It's also similar enough to C++ in many respects so that you don't have to start from scratch, though you will need to adjust your thinking somewhat.

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