Round, I think that is a bit harsh, I think what is clearly lacking for Dave is any structure or direction. I really really don't like the idea of trying to learn multiple languages and chopping changing between them. Your first language is the hardest. I would just pick one and focus on that. You don't need to know everything, the idea of a programmer who knows dozens of languages to advanced levels is a bit of a fallacy. Find a niche you enjoy and study it. You can write C# for over a decade and still learn new things all the time.

It's also massively beneficial to have a castle on top of your mountain to aim for, when I started making websites I did so because "I want an awesome website that looks like that!". That was my eventual goal, it wasn't an optimum route to succeeding but it worked and it was fun. Having multiple targets and directions will have you walking circles.

Also Dave the advanced JS thread wasn't embarrassing imo at all. It was a good thread, I enjoyed it and it has value. Don't worry about it.

I watch 24 lectures and do 13 problem sets within one month, while I am working and looking for a new place to live, and I pick things up slowly? Man, you have some high standards, and yeah, I would never be able to compete with that.

I should have been more clear the the two hours is with constant disturbances as well. It's not like I just stared at the screen for two hours.

There are some things I would freely admit that I struggle with, and many of those things are like "duh," but whatever.

I think part of the reason we perceive it as slow is because, unless you are a teacher, nobody see someone go from absolute 0 to good understanding. For many of us, it has been a decade or more since we started and you can't remember all the details. I would also suspect that a number of us are people that "just get it" when it comes to programing, so the beginning wasn't so bad.

Rather than repeat things Gullanian said, I'll give one piece of advice. Dave, stop saying you are a bad programmer. Obviously you are not as good as some of the people that post here, but you have only been programing for a few months. Programming is such a deep field that you are always learning, you will never know everything and that is perfectly fine.

It is ok to make novice mistakes when you are a novice. A bad programmer is one who repeatedly makes novice mistakes later in their career. You show an amazing persistence and drive to become skilled in something you said does not come naturally to you. That is impressive and continually degrading yourself will build a bigger wall for you to climb over.

Every time you have a "well, that was stupid" moment, that is a big step in learning. The fact is you recognized that you did something wrong that you know see as simple. The next time around, you will remember the "duh" moment and be able to do it the simple way.

wow do you guys really think you can judge if someone is a capable of being a good programmer after only 1 month of learning? That seems absurd.

I don't know much about programming but I think you underestimate how much experience helps. I bet if you were able to go back and look at your own code from when you were starting you would be pretty amused.

Absolutely this. I worked as a TA for a couple of first year CS courses (at a very good CS school) and the vast majority of people had learning curves similar to or slower than daveT.

who cares if you're good or bad, dont worry about any of that crap. i'm sure if you looked at the source of most applications, every other programmer would have contradictions as to whether its coded "good" or "bad". just go out and build something that you enjoy. DO something instead of talking about it. or maybe i'm just a bad programmer trying to defend himself, hah

sorry, but the people who get hired for "programming" jobs are not magical geniuses. in fact, usually they aren't very good programmers. dave is plenty smart and if he continues to study programming with the diligence he's been showing he'll do fine in whatever he chooses.

setting aside the question of dave's raw talent, raw talent is just one of many factors that make up a good employee, and when i'm hiring i'm not even sure if it would make the top 3 on my list.

You would be glad to note that lesson learned on this. I think you were also one of those that said that the way I was going about learning was not very good, so thanks to you as well.

Wow. That is all greek to me. I would like to at least understand a few basic concepts before I try to blow up another computer.

Fwiw, I am not trying to understand a language, just concepts. I know it is considered a flaw of classic logic to defer to experts, but that is really supposed to be undeserving experts. I am sort of hoping that the universities are semi-qualified experts.

As far as goals or specifics. I'm not worried about that right now. I mean, the world is rather large. However, I will most certainly take this advice and create a Linux partition when it is due time.

It might shock you to know that I consider myself a bad writer as well.

It's not like we don't have access to some fairly high-level code via Ctrl-U.

The only thing that many of those guys have that I don't have is a CS or a design degree. It's not like I couldn't do better than most of the crap out there. I really doubt that most of the people who do javascript did much more than a few lines in college. They most certainly didn't read Crockford.

Many of these sites have a glossy finish, but what lies underneath is terrible.

Give an example of what I feel should be classified an amateur mistake:

Many sites have a targeted cell on their sign-up forms. What happens is they fail to make the target execute at load-time, so I have 6 cells filled out and then, without warning, I am writing my address as my first name.

I know this is a minor irritation, and one that most people will probably never notice (and the companies that hired the dev. team obv. don't), but this pisses me off to no end. If the site can't get this minor thing correct, why would I trust them to hold on to my social security or credit-card information?

Of course, I am probably nit-picking and differentiating <b> vs <strong> here. I only wanted to extend the idea that people aren't hiring coding geniuses.

My real threshold is the sites where not only do I get shot back to the target, but the entire form field is deleted. That is beyond comprehension, IMO.

Of course, we don't have to look very far to find unqualified people in all levels of the development world. Look at what happened PS3. If I get the story correct, the security management was beyond wretched, laden with basic mistakes. It's not like we're talking about a start-up project.

Sony's well-documented idiocy with regards to security not withstanding, they do make very good products (albeit with terrible decisions to go along with them). Security is a very difficult topic to master, and Microsoft should be given a lot of credit for how they have handled it for the XBL network. (I worked there for about a year and while there's a lot of shenanigans I could tell you about, the security layer was pretty robust.)

People only notice when security has an epic collapse; if an application has no problems with it in that regard, no one notices. Leaving just a small hole to get through doesn't just mean hackers can get through that hole repeatedly, but rather the hole is best seen as a string on a sweater that rapidly unravels the entire garment.

We all laugh about simple nmap SQL injection attacks succeeding against Sony's little-used picture-sharing site, but the truth is that with so many employees and dumb bureaucracy that runs development shops these days, these attacks are all too common. It doesn't adequately explain their failures, but it should be taken into consideration - securing an application, much less a widespread network, is really, really tough.

My advice would be to install Ubuntu (very friendly) and learn how to use the basic shell commands before moving on to any more programming work.

why? from what i can glean of dave's goals, there are much better uses of his time than learning the linux shell.

I think what Dave should be focusing on is what interests him the most and stirs the most curiosity

This idea that programmers should learn C, or how to use Linux, or low level programming knowledge to be any good is complete garbage. I didn't touch Linux to do more than run an occasional grep command and copy websites until a year ago, and before that I'd been a pro programmer for 7 years, and doing it for 15 years total.

There's SO MUCH you can learn in programming, saying that there's ONE subset of programming that everybody has to learn before they can be competent is outrageous.

how do you propose to learn a computer without benefit of a "programming language"? allow me to assert that bourne shell + GNU tools or "the dos prompt" count as "programming languages" in that they are a secret code you speak to the computer to make it do things.

how maintainable, readable, and/or documented are these scripts? if that guy got hit by a bus or poached by another company, would his replacement have a fighting chance or would she immediately start looking for the grain alcohol and sleeping pills?

i love sed and grep and glueing random systems together together at least as much as the next guy. i admire a nice, solid hack. i'm cool with the oddball, quirky, efficient-for-you way you check your email. but frankly, i have a lot more respect for code and systems that are easy for anyone[**] to understand, modify, and use.

[**] and of course by "anyone" i mean "anyone reasonable". if the system is the company website, then "anyone" must include your dumb website consultant and your even dumber boss. if the system is an OO architecture for managing millions of dollars of inventory, "anyone" probably only needs to be an eager but foolish junior engineer or a mediocre but cowardly senior engineer.

The bus factor of a project is a very important one*. This is one of those things that is not important to computer science, but is huge to software engineering. Because programming is very much of a business and the code belongs to a company and not a person, you have to be able to survive when people leave.

* Bus factor was one of those things we always joked about at my job. Then someone got hit by a semi-truck while driving to work. He was as fine as you can be after that happening. But we did lose the guy who essentially ran the lab for a month and we had to figure out how to make it work.

I agree with this. There are many paths to a successful career.

Now, I think being able to operate a shell is very, very useful... but I can't say I think it's mandatory.

I think it's pretty cool that someone like Dave, coming from a seemingly inexperienced computing background, has the drive and fortitude to try learning things like programming and serious web design, and if he's approaching this more as a hobby and for enjoyment than in hopes of working as a developer in the near future, he needs a lot of slack.

I've been thinking about this lately as my own knowledge and experience have been progressing, how hard it must be to come in to computing nowadays. I've been tinkering with computers for 20 years off and on, and grew up doing all the things technically inclined kids do and have absorbed an amazing amount of general knowledge as the industry has evolved, and I'm still overwhelmed at how much I don't know.

Where in the hell do people start nowadays? If you're into gaming, you'll more than likely end up in the modding scene or tinkering around with something like Unity that only require light scripting skills. If you're into making websites, you don't have to learn much to be productive compared to 10-15 years ago. In either case, the chances of people starting now at this level extending their interest and knowledge from some specific domain into general computing knowledge is probably not a high probability, nor even really a necessity. It makes me curious about what the industry will look like in the future when the kids today that have grown up with Facebook and PSPs become the majority of the workforce.

I'm not sure if Dave has ever stated his goals here about what he hopes to learn, I'd love to hear it if not. I completely agree with Gullanian that you always need a goal and direction to be working towards and something solid to build upon, especially with programming. I'd also like to agree with kyleb that learning the basics of the OS in something like Linux is a good way to start for anyone serious about learning computing, but Tyler is right:

It's as large a step to start there as it is to start with learning C++/Java, and probably more frustrating to learn without a lot of peripheral knowledge.

Hi

I just finished school for comp sci, and still honestly have no clue what field to branch into. It appears that my neighbors son has a data governance company and is looking for recent graduates( I pretty much am guaranteed a job I think). I did a bit of research, and all I can think of so far is that an entry level job would be lots of sql oriented stuff?

Any one else work in the data governance field? thx

Weevil brings up and interesting point: Where DO you start?

I'm a little slow to the tech train. That has much more to do with my upbringing and background than anything else. I grew up in Ohio, and for all the words about the dot-com bust, I think that there were only 3 online companies in the entire state by the year 2001 or so. I didn't grow up with computers and even when I was in 12th grade, we were still in the stages of learning to type on a word-processor. Most of my friends never been on a computer, and if we did go the library, we pretty much thought computers was a stupid concept. Sure, you can write a paper, but there wasn't, in our observation, any that one could do that you couldn't accomplish either with your phone, a calculator, or a pencil. This is circa 1997. Very different worlds, obviously. A nerd was classified as someone who could send an email.

There's a huge difference between growing up with a computer and using BASIC and gliding into something else, going to school, etc., and where someone like me is, who couldn't figure out how to turn on a computer until he was oh, idk, 25 I guess?

So, you start with the basics, obv. And the basics is something a little deeper than writing on word, and something a little more high-level than a language that risks frying your computer (which I was an expert at).

I am of the opinion that having goals from the outset isn't a good idea, and hopefully you read this part before you quote it and call me a dumb-ass. Take the guys who are really good with computers now days, you know the ones who started up writing BASIC at 12? What was their goals, really? Maybe they wanted to make the next big Atari game or something? I don't know. The point is that these people probably ended up going somewhere else. The world was, and is, simply too large to focus on X goal when you are 12. Although I am 12 + 20 years old, I am fundamentally no better off in my knowledge, except that I know the world is much larger.

If the point is to learn programming, then I have to start at scratch, which basically means that if I run across something that isn't befitting to my "goal," then I have to learn it anyways. If I had that goal, I may end up tossing the idea out because "I may risk losing sight of my goal," or whatever excuse I create that doesn't confront the simple fact that the concept is too strange or hard.

I had to create computer players that make decisions, simulations, and data-layers so far. Those things were fairly difficult for me to do, and very far from any goals I have in mind. But the idea isn't to learn how to run a simulation or create extra players. The idea is learning how to organize a program and think through a problem. That is my goal: find a problem and figure out if I have the ability to finish it with my current knowledge set. I am open to discovering something new. If I end up finding I enjoy building websites, I most certainly won't regret this learning path.

If the intro to programming classes call themselves programming classes for people with little to no knowledge, then I fit that bill perfectly. They don't start you with HTML for a reason.

I originally got into programming because of the stupid iPad and probably something to do with mid-life crises (at 30, I know...). I don't actually own any iX device, but I realized two things: the world is passing me by and going to school for massage therapy was about the dumbest goddamn thing I ever did in my life. I have always been afraid of technology and I have have to confront that fear at some point. Making a living via poker and writing sucks, so what else to do?

If I had focused on my 'goal' of writing phone apps, I wouldn't have been exposed to web building, which I discovered I really enjoy doing, which brings me back to the point of why I think not having a set goal at this point is useless.

I learned my tech stuff while a theater technician, which is what got me through college my first go round. Basically I vacuumed up Byte and Compute magazine learning about the hardware of PCs, which was a much smaller domain in the 386 days. Got my second computer doing some dorky correspondence course in programming which left me without being able to finish a grading db for my a friend of mine who was a professor. That's when I went to DeVry and got a CIS degree, that was when I was 30. Was exposed to a lot of languages but most learned COBOL, was in uber geek mode, real overachiever, and started working for huge IT companies. Haven't written production code for years but have cobbled some python together and need to do more and am getting to participate in architecture discussions because of system knowledge. Maybe if I'd had a computer in high school I wouldn't have been a theater geek and would be a hawsome developer now.

A little ramble, but just goes to show there is room for non-great developers too.

In the process of trying to submit my first app to the mac app store... such a complex process.

Woot I managed to get Alpha access to google fonts web API Not hugely exciting, but exciting for me anyway Got some great ideas what to do on it.

omg ytmnd in comic sans! WEB TWO POINT OH IS OFFICIALLY HERE.

()

+1

Dave, IMHO you're not taking the best route to learning how to program. Pick ONE language. What you need to understand is that languages essentially do the same thing, they enable you to tell the computer how to do something. So in the end, it's just a mish mash of different syntax.

Data structures, algorithms and design are more important if you want to be a good developer. Armed with these skills, the language you choose to implement in is just a minor detail. I think you're going about your learning the wrong way. Stop jumping around as Gullanian said. Just pick one (Java, Ruby, Python are all acceptable and no one can argue it'd be a mistake to learn one of them) and focus on the basics of programming. Start with data structures, pick a problem and write the algorithms to solve it, re-examine those algo's and see if you can optimize it, challenge yourself with some recursion problems, delve into object oriented design, start writing larger programs where the program's organization and structure is just as important as the function the program serves. All of this will put you on a good path to becoming a good programmer and notice how none of what I listed is language dependent.

I think there is some confusion here.

I'm on the second class, which is called "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" (SIP). The first class is called "Introduction to Computer Science and Programming" (IP).

Just by the names themselves, you get the idea that conceptually, their connection is arbitrary at best. SIP does not start with "Hey look, this is 'Hello, World!' in Scheme, look at how awesome that is compared to COBOL...."

It discusses concepts that were never touched on in IP. The idea is learning how to approach building larger and more complex programs.

For example, they enforce the idea of using 'wishful thinking' and abstraction.

A simple illustration is as follows:

Why is:

better than:

Fine, these aren't the world's best examples, but consider if you wanted to make this function add the squares of five digits and you at least begin to see why the first is better than the second.

But the idea goes a step further. Suppose you had to use squares all over your program? And then consider you are working on a program and you discover that using squares isn't such a great idea, but you need to cube your squares instead.

The second part of this deals with the 'wishful thinking.' Suppose you honestly have no idea how to create the squares of the number (bear with my stupid examples, okay?). Now you are stuck at some point in the program. You know you need to have all these squaring procedures. Do you stop your entire program-building or do you just keep on going?

They argue that you should keep on going and worry about the squaring later. They can make this argument because on a level of abstraction, suppose you hire out Sally to build (define square x). Do you really need to know what that function does? No. Of course not. You only need to know when and where to use it. By separating this from your mind, you can use wishful thinking to create your program and get to the abstracted layers later.

Compare this to a homework assignment from IP. They give you a large template with the functions and classes you are supposed to use. All you have to do is figure out how to write the stuff inside the bodies. While this is good for learning the foundations (a slippery concept for sure), it doesn't do much to help you approach building a program.

So what does this have to do with what I am doing now? As I said, I'm building up a poker hand simulator. I know that I need it to do x, y, z.... Well, z is the issue. Z in my program is tracking how much of the deck is left after the hands and board is dealt.

I have this helpful function in my code:

I know where it should go, when to use it, and I know conceptually what it does. Conceptually is the key word. I know that my program will work plenty fine when I am done with it, so I can add it to the places in my program I need it Do I need to understand updateDeck() at this point? No.

The point is that I am not "learning a bunch of languages." I am learning concepts, and yes, Scheme just so happens to be a language I am ~using~ to learn these concepts.

Call me doubtful, but I don't think that buying "Programming Python" is going to teach me these concepts even if it is 1600 pages long. I've already went the route of learning one language and I have no handle on how to use any of it. I would totally encourage anyone struggling with programming to use these classes long before buying a language-specific book. A language-specific book implies you have an idea of what you are doing before you walk in.

Someone on this forum once told me that if I wanted to learn a language, learn French, otherwise, learn concepts. Without concepts, you can do crap with the language anyways. My current project takes every bit of knowledge I know (and don't really know). I am writing it in Python and I am using concepts from a "Scheme class" to do it.

Did I mention that for some reason, I don't like Python?

Dave,

Now you are on the right track.