haha yes that is probably the best answer

Thanks for the replies guys.

I'm about to start lecture 2 and then try the first assignment. I'm really interested now how long it will take me, I doubt I'll beat 2 hours.

Several of my friends who have jobs dabbled a bit in programming and one of them actually self taught himself programming for the past 2-3 years even though his major and job was business/marketing and he works at a small chemical research company. He was part of my inspiration to take up programming because he told me if you do any job out there, if you can also add a bit of programming skills to your resume, it'll make you so much more valuable to the company. Considering how every every company and person uses computers nowadays and its only going to become more commonplace, I'd have to agree with his statement regardless of what field of work you're actually in.

As I've said before, programming for the sake of programming is the best way to bore yourself extremely quickly. Think of a product/service you'd like to make (or something you'd like to duplicate to see how it works, like how to log into a page - authentication) and go for that. If you don't have an idea to keep the interest going, you'll tire of it extremely fast.

by that reasoning, doing stuff like the euler problems would be boring. maybe i'm just a huge dork, but i totally enjoy stuff like that.

I consider "programming for programming" to be more like just writing toy examples with a language you're unsure of. Things like Project Euler at least have you solving difficult problems.

I agree. Solving Euler problems is actually solving a logical task. Doing examples like Hello World v2-10 from a programming-specific book bores me rather fast.

ah yeah i agree with this

So many times in my life, I've done the following:

1. Hear about a cool language.
2. Buy a book about said language.
3. Read the book, or most of the book. Do some of the examples from the book.
4. Never get around to doing a real project with it.
5. Forget said language.

Yep, exactly. Doing the Facebook Engineering Puzzles is a great thing to do to learn the language, and provides a standardized source code library you can show prospective employers on GitHub.

Nice link. Didn't know about those!

I like them because I've completed them all in PHP but they're a great standardized "project set" to work on with other languages to transfer knowledge across code. I'm working on them in Ruby now.

The hacker cup was fun, but I didn't compete in the actual event due to time constraints. My friend (dev at Amazon) made the top 500 and gave me the problems after he finished them, and I worked through them over a long period of time for fun. Some were pretty cool, like cracking a badly-designed PRNG slot machine with C++ sample code.

I don't know how into this stuff you guys are going to be but I'm pretty determined to go through the intro computer course from the MIT lectures. If you guys wanna discuss/help each other with some assignments and stuff I'd be down for that since we're not exactly in a classroom environment with peers to talk about ideas with. Currently around lecture 4 but working on the 3rd assignment.