I'm not much of a programer, but this often can work to my advantage when
helping newbies (e.g. I don't say stuff like "Assembly is easy. Start with
that").
On Mon, 27 Aug 2001 17:32, Isaac Curtis wrote:
> Hey All,
>
> As I think I said in my other email, I am just finishing Kernighan &
> Ritchie's "The C Programming Language" 2nd edition and I also lifted a
> copy of "Learning the Bash Shell" (O'Reilly) tonight that I'm starting
> to get into. My question/request is that I'm very excited to be
> learning these new things but I don't really know what to do with myself
> now. I'd like to have some relatively novice-level code to read and
> maybe some suggestions for beginners projects to help flex my new muscles.
>
> 1. What are some open-source programs that someone of my experience
> level could look at and try to tinker with that will help me to
> understand more about programming?
Stay away from GUI stuff. Look at small console apps.
> 2. Since I'm starting to learn bash as we speak, what are some tasks
> that would be helpful and a little bit challenging for me to try to
> figure out how to automate with a script?
I can't think of any specific 'tasks', but put some time into learning the
grep and awk commands. According to the man page, awk is a "pattern scanning
and processing language", and can be extremely useful for a sysadmin.
> 4. Ok, so this is the real last one: Once I start pushing my C a
> little further I'd like to expand into another language. I know the two
> most common suggestions will be Java and C++, and I know that everyone
> will say eventually I need to learn both. Well, which will give me the
> most immediate satisfaction? Does it make more sense to learn one
> before the other? Just looking for a few suggestions, I know these
> debates can get pretty testy. If it makes any difference, I'm really
> aching for something I can apply to some sort of game programs, even
> very simple ones.
Python is the ultimate beginners' language -- simple, uncluttered, functional
and easy to learn. Java isn't bad, but C++ is a pain. Perl is very useful,
but it can be difficult.
--
Sridhar Dhanapalan.
"There are two major products that come from Berkeley:
LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."
-- Jeremy S. Anderson
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