On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 10:43 AM, Udhay Shankar N <[email protected]> wrote: > This list contains a large number of self-taught programmers. How did > you get started, and how did you get to a moderate level of skill? (If > you want to talk about what happened after that, great, but I am more > interested in the first two stages)
My introduction to computers was in the middle of high school. Our curriculum (introduced to high schoolers for the first time in the late 80's) included flowcharts, BASIC and Fortran and about an hour of hands-on computer time a week. I voraciously devoured any books on computers (many of questionable value, I later realized) that I could lay my hands on. I also found that I had a natural appetite for coding and managed to squeeze in an extra hour a day of hands-on computer time in the school lab (30 minutes in the morning before school started, 30 minutes during lunch). Soon I knew more than my poor teachers and they left me alone to play with the computers in the lab as long as I did not ask any difficult questions in class. I wrote a handful of primitive games, but my education was highly unstructured. In addition to an hour-a-day of hands-on programming, I also wrote a lot of programs on paper. When I went to university I naturally chose Computer Science as my major. However, I was very unhappy with my classmates (who were extremely socially-inept nerds or rich brats who could get a seat in college through daddy's influence). After a disastrous third semester (when I went to class <50% of the time) I balked at the idea of spending 2+ years in their company and changed majors. Changing my major meant that I had almost no access to computers till my final year of college. At the end of the third year of college I studied C and Unix at one of the computer training institutes in Madras. I was extremely lucky because I had an excellent teacher (unlike 99.9% of these computer institute teachers). The first half of the class was basic programming with C. The second half of the class was introduction to various concepts and then writing the unix toolchain (cd, ls, cat, diff, etc.) from scratch using the C we had learned. In my final year of college one of my friends who has gone to the US to do his masters snail mailed me print outs of the Jargon file and I suddenly realized that there were others like me out there and that we had a cool name for who we are: Hackers. Thaths -- Marge: Quick, somebody perform CPR! Homer: Umm (singing) I see a bad moon rising. Marge: That's CCR! Homer: Looks like we're in for nasty weather. Sudhakar Chandra Slacker Without Borders
