Starting late with coding

[Lucas]

How about becoming a developer for XenForo? Ok, just kidding here.

You might be asking too much there, but who knows, maybe in the future.

 

[BirdOPrey5]

College is no help in coding whatsoever... The summer before I started college I read one of those "Teach Yourself C in 24 hours" books because my professor to be said I needed prior c experience to take his class and all I had done up to that point was various flavors of Basic. Long story short after reading that book I was ahead of the class for the next 2 years... when they were introducing simple graphics I had a pacman clone... Just find a good book and go to town, don't be afraid to think outside the box- combine 2 or more totally unrelated 'lessons' to make something great.

I hate to admit it but I don't know any language as good as I did c back in the day, but I don't 'need' to know it, I just know enough that I can find what I need in the php manual and go from there.

 

[Disjunto]

College is no help in coding whatsoever... The summer before I started college I read one of those "Teach Yourself C in 24 hours" books because my professor to be said I needed prior c experience to take his class and all I had done up to that point was various flavors of Basic. Long story short after reading that book I was ahead of the class for the next 2 years... when they were introducing simple graphics I had a pacman clone... Just find a good book and go to town, don't be afraid to think outside the box- combine 2 or more totally unrelated 'lessons' to make something great.

I hate to admit it but I don't know any language as good as I did c back in the day, but I don't 'need' to know it, I just know enough that I can find what I need in the php manual and go from there.

I wrote a pong/breakout combo game my first week at uni in C, everyone else was learning how to echo or init variables or something. Being ahead of everyone that much was kind of annoying, got bored half way through year

 

[BirdOPrey5]

I found it left me more time for extra-curricular activities...

 

[Disjunto]

I found it left me more time for extra-curricular activities...

yeah, my extra curricular activities led to me nearly failing my 2nd year. but that's a completely different topic

 

[Alex]

I'm only just starting myself, all what I know is self taught by reading the code that i need to edit, thankfully I seeem to be able to get a good understanding of how it works by doing that (guess i must have a loigcal brain after all lol)

I do want to get more involved with the coding side of things though, just gonna play and learn I think

 

[Kuma]

How about becoming a developer for XenForo? Ok, just kidding here.

I am anything but a developer. I understand good programing concepts and philosophy, but a bear does not make a good programmer.

 

[CBI Web]

Everything I know about coding I learned on the WWW. One very good site for beginner PHP is http://www.tizag.com/phpT/index.php

 

[Brandon_R]

You don't want to learn from sites like that as they teach bad habbits. I suggest starting off with a book suggesting coding standards as these things can be hard to break into when you really get coding.

 

[Lawrence]

I started with writing Assembly for the Commodore 64, and then the Amiga. I sent a few programs to Ahoy! magazine.

Tried C, Fortran, Basic, Pascal, but never liked them. Assembly gave you complete control.

 

[CBI Web]

You don't want to learn from sites like that as they teach bad habbits. I suggest starting off with a book suggesting coding standards as these things can be hard to break into when you really get coding.

Not necessarily. There are good sites and bad sites, just as there are good books and bad books. The trick is to know the difference, which can only come from experience; and from others who have been there done that.

 

[Lawrence]

Not necessarily. There are good sites and bad sites, just as there are good books and bad books. The trick is to know the difference, which can only come from experience; and from others who have been there done that.

I had about three years of php coding under my belt before I purchased my first set of books. I started by asking "How do I..." at phpbb.com, and went from there. It wasn't the "how" where I learned when people responded, but the "why". I was hooked.

 

[Kier]

I got started by taking apart vBLite (anyone remember that?) and adding user registration and a decent post editor to it.

That taught me enough to be hired by vBulletin.

 

[BirdOPrey5]

I started with writing Assembly for the Commodore 64, and then the Amiga. I sent a few programs to Ahoy! magazine.

Tried C, Fortran, Basic, Pascal, but never liked them. Assembly gave you complete control.

In college I had 1 class that was assembly language of some Motorola chip... it seemed the most like "Basic" of any other language since each step had to be "basic" basically. I ended up using that for my senior design project and programmed an electronic parking meter with an IR interface. Oh my... I used to be smart...

 

[Lawrence]

In college I had 1 class that was assembly language of some Motorola chip... it seemed the most like "Basic" of any other language since each step had to be "basic" basically. I ended up using that for my senior design project and programmed an electronic parking meter with an IR interface. Oh my... I used to be smart...

Yeah me too.

You want tedious? My first programming course focused on loading programs by switches: Up = 1, down = 0. lol, talk about triple checking your work! 8 switches, one for each bit. Set the byte, and press "Load".

 

[Dean]

Yeah me too.

You want tedious? My first programming course focused on loading programs by switches: Up = 1, down = 0. lol, talk about triple checking your work! 8 switches, one for each bit. Set the byte, and press "Load".

I believe we used jumper wires instead of switches.

Then there were fortran cards, paper tape, magnetic tape... I just wish I knew how to use myphpadmin.

 

[Mark.B]

I'm scarcely worthy of being called a coder, but I can do basic stuff and a little bit more.

I started by adapting XMB (the software I used to use before vB). I wanted it to look and function a bit more like vB2 (the then current version) as vB2 was the software run by the Tiscali forums, which my forum was effectively a breakaway from. We didn't know back then that we would last, hence me not initially buying a licence.

XMB takes some stick but back then it was very user friendly for people who wanted to play around hacking the back end. And I am only capable of what I do on my site today because of the start XMB gave me. SO I'll always be grateful to them for that.

Basically I taught myself by playing around on my live site (didn't matter then!) and learning what led to parse errors!! I became well known for parse errors "oh Mark must be playing with the code again!)

Switched to vB2 in late 2003 (no Impex then, but Jelsoft had some other XMB importer which did the job well) and then to vB3 almost as soon as it came out (IB take note! Even a full rewrite was fairly easy for me to upgrade a hacked board to straight away).

And now...ready to move into the next phase of my site's history, the third different software we'll have used....wonder what software that will be eh? Hmmm....

 

[CBI Web]

The first computing I ever did was learning 1+1=2. I must have been, what, 5? 6? (there was no Sesame Street back then to teach me any earlier)

 

[Lawrence]

The first computing I ever did was learning 1+1=2. I must have been, what, 5? 6? (there was no Sesame Street back then to teach me any earlier)

funny, I seen 1 + 1 as 0 with a carry of 1.

hmmm, maybe it's not that funny. I need help

 

[Green Cat]

for example go try to program a php script to count to 50 and output it on a page.

<?php
for($count = 1; $count <= 50; $count++)
{
    echo $count;
}
?>

Here you go