Personally I would not confuse him with OOP before he has grasped the
basics of programming.
On my degree we did our training using pascal and cobol and I thought
the pascal was very good as it all had to be well structured to work.
VFP is not as structured so it is easy to get into bad habits from the
start, with things like changing variable types in the middle of a program.
Just off the top of my head I remember that all programs had to have the
right balance of:
- functionality (did it work)
- readability
- efficiency (speed)
- documentation
+ some other that I can't remember.
There were lots of other rules we had about 1 entry point and 1 exit
point for a procedure, case statements had to be mutually exclusive and
exhaustive etc.
Good luck with the training.
* Peter Cushing *
IT development and support
Signature
Dave Crozier wrote:
Following my pre-Christmas post regarding aptitude tests for prospective
programming staff we have now offered to post to what we consider is a suitable
applicant. The person in question is a First class honours degree student in IT
- but NO programming experience at all, which struck me a weird as how can you
consider yourself an IT professional and know the depths of TCP/IP, networking
protocol etc. and Never have been exposed to coding in any shape or form
ever??? Eh, what is that all about .... But maybe that is a topic for another
discussion in the future.
I need to get him over the initial hurdle of OOP and basic structured programming
techniques"if... endif" "do ... while" etc. and wonder if anyone has any
resources bookmarked that would assist in the learning process. Don't get me wrong, I am going to
mentor him closely but really need to let him loose on some type of programming beginners course so
I can see if he sinks or swims (hopefully the latter).
It is scary how much we as pro's carry in our heads about techniques to solve
problems in code and when you begin to look at it from a total beginner's point
of view one realises what a huge leap in understanding and experience you have
over mere mortals!!
Any resource links will be useful and I specifically don't want him to start
with C# or .Net stuff as I think that VFP is the ideal environment (being a
fairly closed instruction set allied with Database inclusion) to get him up to
speed before moving on to SQL Server, TSQL and C# etc. Ultimately he will be
supporting our huge VFP legacy code so once again a good reason for starting
with VFP.
I am working on the basis of him being fairly self-sufficient in VFP to be able
to read/understand our existing system bot not necessarily be able to modify it
... and estimate this will take 3-4 months. No timescale is being imposed on
his learning phase but I want to get the most information into him in as short
a period as possible.
Dave
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