Which programming language should I learn?

[AtW]

When I learn a language I usually pick a book with plenty of pictures to colour with my crayons.. Programming is a practical activity and practice makes perfect.

FTFY

[sasguru]

FTFY

It really bothers you when I talk about programming. doesn't it?
That's because you have defined yourself, wrongly, as an uber-programmer and you can't stand the thought that I am a better and more experienced programmer than you

I'll tell you why your product isn't selling: you don't have anything very clever in there: you're dealing with data and you know nothing of stats or AI techniques for example,.

[VectraMan]

I reached a stage of being sick to death of coding, then became a contractor and found I liked it again. I think it was the working for years on one project that did it. "Normal" people refuse to believe it, but programming is a creative pursuit, and that's what makes it enjoyable. If you ever find yourself doing a monotonous task, chances are you have a bad design, and that's where your creative side should kick in and come up with a good design that allows you to do the code in half the time and skive off the afternoon. I find nothing motivates me more than finding clever ways to avoid hard work.

This is assuming you are in an environment where you're allowed to be creative, and don't have some idiot waving his UML spec at you.

[AtW]

It really bothers you when I talk about programming. doesn't it?

No, but it really bothers me when you talk at all!!!

[sasguru]

I reached a stage of being sick to death of coding, then became a contractor and found I liked it again. I think it was the working for years on one project that did it. "Normal" people refuse to believe it, but programming is a creative pursuit, and that's what makes it enjoyable. If you ever find yourself doing a monotonous task, chances are you have a bad design, and that's where your creative side should kick in and come up with a good design that allows you to do the code in half the time and skive off the afternoon. I find nothing motivates me more than finding clever ways to avoid hard work.

This is assuming you are in an environment where you're allowed to be creative, and don't have some idiot waving his UML spec at you.

WHS.

[sasguru]

No, but it really bothers me when you talk at all!!!

Try and learn from it. You'll eventually find I'm right.

HTH

[AtW]

Try and learn from it. You'll eventually find I'm right.

Or else you'll retire my account?

[russell]

Using Microsofts .net develoment frameworks and tools, especially 2010 allows you to create anything you want. C# as your language for libraries with VS 2010, MVC 3 with Razor view engine with JQuery for web front ends. WCF for web services, Entity framework 3 with linq and SQL server for data. WWF for workflows which can call wcf and be wrapped in a wcf service.

The only thing you need to add is an idea.

[Cliphead]

A word of warning: reading about coding is not the same as coding. When I learn a language I usually pick a book with plenty of hard exercises. Programming is a practical activity and practice makes perfect.

The tutorial is good in the sense that it's based on actual coding and after an introduction to a topic leaves you to fill in the blanks with no full code listing, you have to get it right before moving on.

Seriously enjoying this.

[sasguru]

The tutorial is good in the sense that it's based on actual coding and after an introduction to a topic leaves you to fill in the blanks with no full code listing, you have to get it right before moving on.

Seriously enjoying this.

Write a program to solve any Sudoku problem. That's a good intermediate problem to test your understanding.

For a more difficult problem, program the end game in chess with, say a few pieces, e.g. pawns and Kings only. This will require an implementation of the alpha-beta pruning algorithm.

The latter used to be my test for mastery in a programming language. If you can do this nothing in a commercial environment will cause you too many problems.