Posted: 12/1/2010 11:04:13 AM EDT
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I've taken a few programming classes in the past and with help have passed them, but I'm still missing a fundamental understanding of programming. I've never had it explained to where it just made sense to me. I can fumble through some scripting type stuff when needed (vVBscript, Powershell), but nothing too high level.
My job title is network admin, but I'm more of a systems admin,Windows server, VMware, some cisco stuff etc. It would be nice to be able to really understand programming so I could do it where needed. Does anyone know of a good resource that really helped programming make sense to you? |
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There are some good books around, like Petzold's Code, that walk you from basic math and electronics through to high level programming.
And I'd be happy to clear up any confusion, but I'd have to know the sticking point first. What aspect of programming is giving you trouble? |
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Quoted:
There are some good books around, like Petzold's Code, that walk you from basic math and electronics through to high level programming. And I'd be happy to clear up any confusion, but I'd have to know the sticking point first. What aspect of programming is giving you trouble? All of it. 
I've just never had it explained in a way that it makes sense. I can do a little code when it's limited to a single page, but when you start creating multiple objects and functions and calling them in different locations etc. it gets a bit confusing. Hard to explain I guess, since I don't really know what it is I don't understand. ETA: I'll have to check that book, looks interesting. |
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I think this book is great. It starts you off with the most basic concepts and incrementally takes you up through object-oriented programming.
Each chapter has you building some little interactive application, and at the end of the chapters are a couple of 'challenges' to make modifications to the program to extend it or have it behave differently. http://www.amazon.com/Python-Programming-Absolute-Beginner-3rd/dp/1435455002/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1291422799&sr=8-3 I self taught myself from never having worked in IT to being a software developer, and this is the book that helped me build my fundamentals. |
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Quoted: I've never had it explained to where it just made sense to me. It is teaching Dustin Hoffman of Rainman how to make a Wedding Cake. Everything else like structured programming, OOP, the various languages created over the years is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic... "... I believe that my code will go on." |
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"... I believe that my code will go on." The worst part about your code living on is people coming to you 5 years later wanting something enhanced or fixed. I can hardly remember what I did last week much less that long ago. Right now I'm having to go back and look at some stuff I wrote 4 years ago and it's a pain. 
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I guess you were searching MSDN? It shouldn't be too hard to find stuff. Which language were you looking at?
I've been programming too long to remember if there was any definitive source that made it click for me. I'm willing to bet no. I just started reading and typing in code samples. I started on a Timex Sinclair ZX-81 and a tape drive. 
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Yeah, they keep releasing new versions of MSDN over old ones, each more poorly written than the last. Now you have no clue which version google is returning, unless you happen to recognize all the bizarre shit that that version lacks or gets wrong. There's been no attempt by MS at bringing a single comprehensive version forward.
It's actually sad, and endemic of MS's post-Gates problems. Nobody in an oversight position to manage yearly and team consistency, so each year brings out product versions that are disjointedly unconnected to prior releases of the same product, and are unrecognizably different from other products. This is why Office 2008 is so wildly different from 2005, why OS's were in the shit for a decade, and why no two MS products use remotely similar login dialogs or help screens or standard prompts or menus. One has options under Edit, another under View, another has it on a ribbon only, etc. Terrible management, and MSDN is their defining failure. |
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I don't know much about Windows specific languages, but I regularly code in PHP, Perl, Python (my personal favorite), Bash, etc. When it comes to programming, you really need to grasp the underlying concepts. Once you have those, you can jump to another language with little effort as its more about grammar/syntax than anything else. Like another poster said, can you give us a real world example of what trips you up, so that we have a starting point to work off of? |
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Makes a lot of since concerning MS. They're really gone downhill since his departure.
It sounds like a scripting language is what you need. I've never programmed with it but we do have an email scanner one of our guys wrote in Python. It scans all of the log files from our builds and looks for errors saving us a lot of man-hours and reducing the likelihood of missing something by visually scanning. If it finds a problem it fires off an email to the dev team. |