You weren't addressing me, and this is all a bit off-topic, but since you sent this to the list I am assuming you are soliciting advice generally.
What is your opinion on experience? e.g. When is somebody a > professional developer? > You are a professional developer when you start making money at it, that is pretty much the accepted definition. There are unfortunately plenty of professional developers out there that are not nearly qualified however, and lots of hobbyists that extremely talented, so I wouldn't worry too much about the label. > How long did it take you guys to feel comfortable with coding as3, and > especially understanding precisely how Away3D works?; > These will really depend on how many other languages you already know, and how experienced you are. Someone who knows a couple of similar languages well (e.g., Javascript and Java) can pick up as3 in a couple of hours. How much projects have you done? > How much time do you spend on a project per day or per month? > Do you work in a team? > Lots, too many, and yes :) > I'm trying to get an idea whether I'm taking the right steps... > > For example this project which I've been working on for more than > three months: > <snip> Yes, you are on the right track. The details are mostly unimportant, to be honest. The best way to become a better programmer is by writing code (specifically learning from your mistakes), and from reading code from more experienced programmers. A good way to do this (short of working on a team of better programmers) is to help out with an open source project, maybe by fixing bugs ( http://code.google.com/p/away3d/issues/list ) at first? If you plan to be a professional developer, don't worry about or get too caught up in specific technologies. Eventually Away3d will get replaced with some great new thing (no offense guys :), as3 will be replaced by as4 or Javascript (or whatever), Flash will be swept aside by some other shinier technology, and so on and so forth. The key is to fully understand the fundamentals, which are applicable to every language and programming environment you will encounter. If you love programming and want to do it professionally, and well, this means you should spend some time understanding data structures, algorithms, and complexity. Also, every language has it's flaws so it is worth learning other languages so you don't get stuck in the mindset of a single one. You are already familiar with OOP, so learning a functional language (like Erlang or Clojure or Scala) will blow your mind and enable and give you a whole new set of problem solving tools in your conceptual toolbox. Learning at least a little bit of a lower level language like C (or even better, assembly) will give a better understanding of what is really going on under the hood. Learning Unix and a scripting language like Ruby or Python or Perl will give you a bag of tricks to get real day to day work done quickly. In general, fretting about editors and project layouts and specific libraries to do this or that is entirely missing the point. Everyone has their favorites, and in the long term these will all change anyway. Reading and writing code is how you learn and grow, and that sounds like what you are already doing :) And lastly, I'm never sure about the speed and performance of the > flash player. > If I use the debugger in FB, and I run the code step by step, I don't > understand how the Flash Player can handle the amount of commands that > come by every second. > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-in-time_compilation > Does the extra code within Away3dLite's classes (extra code; Lights, > shaders, etc..) which I don't use have an (Serious) impact on the > performance? Remember, my goal was to make this viewer Lightning > fast... > The debugger should verify that nope, they don't hurt. > That's why I'm trying to understand what Object3D.project(), > ObjectContainer3D.project() and Mesh.project() actually do. (Matrix > calculations, projection plane, etc...) > Check out this book as well, it is a reasonable introduction to the underlying concepts: http://www.amazon.com/Primer-Graphics-Development-Wordware-Library/dp/1556229119 Anyway, best of luck. -Ken
