Hello and suggestion!
 

Greetings everyone! I'm new here, and I wanted to say hello. I had been a computer science major at college, however after my second year of dealing with some closed box cash register program written in Java I was still unable to even write a hello world program - not just my problem, but everyone in my class had the same issue. Tack that on to being told that I was expected to be in the lab 80-100 hours a week, I quit, and became a psychology major. This was mostly filler - I could enjoy a social life at college and still get A's in psychology. Throughout I worked as a systems technician, and accumulated 5 years worth of experience working.

Well, I'm looking to get back into programming. I still remember most of the basics, but I'm trying to figure out if I should start relearning on a unix platform, or one of the windows platforms. Also, were I to begin with windows development, would you reccomend one of the older versions of visual studio (6), visual studio 2005 (a friend from Drexel loaned me his educational edition), or downloading the trial of Orcas from Microsoft?

I'm interested mostly at programming theory right now, nothing language specific, just the logic. Something to refresh myself on concepts, and then I can move on from there.

Right now I've got experience with the following: BASIC, Perl, some php, java, c, c++, c#, and an itty bit of python.

So, in summary, hi! And what would you reccomend? :)
Thanks!

Re: Hello and suggestion!
 

With all those languages under your belt I would guess you need to learn about logical thought and problem solving, rather than syntax.

Worrying about the underlying system seems a bit premature, too. Go with what you have.

Re: Hello and suggestion!
 

They're not really under my belt so much as I can generally read the code and understand whats going on, and i've written some trivial stuff in all of the above. I most likely couldn't write a program off the top of my head in anything but perl and qbasic :) (maybe c).

Either way, which platform would you reccomend I take the dive back in to? And can you point me towards any good tomes on logical thought/problem solving? Even web references would be wonderful!

Re: Hello and suggestion!
 

It's impossible for us to judge your current level of expertise. If you want to begin from the beginning, more or less, you could go through the assignments available in courses such as this.

Again, I don't know why you're worrying about platform. Go with what you have. If you don't have something, get the one you're most familiar with operating.

If that's Windows, I would definitely not recommend VC++ 6.0. After all, it was released before the standard. It isn't very compliant. VC++ 2005 seems perfectly adequate to me. I definitely don't recommend Dev-Cpp. It is no longer receiving serious support or advancement.

Other options are Ultimate++, Code::Blocks, or EasyEclipse for C/C++. The latter uses the MinGW compiler; I'm not sure about the rest.

In my estimation, VC++ 2005 has a debugger that is hard to beat.